“Symbol's value as a variable is void: defun” when reloading .emacs?

Question

I am always editing my .emacs file, and I was just wondering if I could reload it without restarting Emacs?

Note: I have tried M-x load-file and choosing the .emacs file, but I get this error message:

Could faulty code be causing this? Here is my code:

(set-background-color "#1E1E20")
(set-foreground-color "#D9CB9E")

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/")
(require 'auto-complete-config)
(add-to-list 'ac-dictionary-directories "~/.emacs.d//ac-dict")
(ac-config-default)

(defun defun ()
  "Insert defun function."
  (interactive)
  (insert "(defun name () 
  \"Insert description here.\"
)")
  (backward-char 35)
)

(defun hello () 
  "Just a gretting."
  (interactive)
  (message "Hello World!")
)

Answer 1

The first thing to know is that Elisp has almost no special syntax--defun is just an Elisp macro for defining functions. Its expansion is rather simple, as you can see from running a quick macroexpansion:

(defalias 'defun
  (function
   (lambda nil "Insert defun function."
     (interactive)
     (insert "(defun name () 
  \"Insert description here.\"
)")
     (backward-char 35))))

An important thing to note: the name of the function being defined in defun is just an argument to a macro. Since defun is a macro, it does not evaluate its arguments immediately. defalias, on the other hand, is a built-in function, so it takes a quoted version of the function name--otherwise it would try to evaluate the function name as a variable.

Elisp is incredibly flexible, so it is more than happy to re-define defun to be a function rather than a macro, which is what you did in your code, and for functions (unlike macros) all arguments are immediately evaluated. The error I got was slightly different than yours--I got hello being undefined as a variable (I'm guessing your error was caused by some sort of byte-compilation or double-evaluation). Once you understand how function evaluation works in Elisp, this makes perfect sense--the interpreter first evaluates hello as a variable in order to pass that value to the new function defun. If hello were defined, you would probably get a "wrong number of arguments" error instead (since your new version of defun takes no arguments).

The moral of the story: Elisp lets you do pretty much anything, but that doesn't mean you should. Never re-define built-in functions or macros unless you want debugging hell.

Answer 2

The problem

defun is already an elisp macro, which is similar to a function. So doing something like (defun defun () ..) is redefining the function called defun to do something else.
Since defun is used throughout Emacs (including in your .emacs), redefining it is a recipe for disaster.

The problem should be fixed if you change that to anything that doesn't override a fundamental elisp function (defun write-defun () ..).

What you actually wanted

What you are trying to do is auto-insert a template for defining a new defun. To achieve that you can use the yasnippet package.

Here is an inbuilt yasnippet template for inserting defun's [Source]:

# -*- mode: snippet -*-
# name: defun
# key: def
# --
(defun ${1:fun} (${2:args})
  ${3:(interactive${4: "P"})}
  $0)

How to use this template?

• Install yasnippet from Melpa
• Add (require 'yasnippet) and (yas-global-mode 1) to your init.el.
• Restart emacs or load-file your init.el
• Now in a buffer with emacs-lisp-mode major mode, type def and hit TAB.
  • Magic! You will see the defun template inserted for you. This is because of the # key: def line in the template for defun.
  • Now by hitting TAB consecutively, you cursor will jump through the positions labeled $1, $2, $3, $4, and finally end up at the $0 position.

If you'd like to understand that template in more detail, I would suggest having a read of this tutorial by Matthew Keeler. It was very useful for me to help get started with yasnippet.