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I am setting up a few hydras, one of which should open a frequently accessed file. The following command works, if I bind a keyboard sequence to it:

(lambda () (interactive) (find-file "~/capture.org"))

How would I rewrite it if I want to get the file (capture.org here) from a variable?

(setq my-file-variable "~/capture.org")
(lambda () (interactive) (find-file my-file-variable))

This returns an error: "Wrong type argument: stringp, ("~/capture.org")"

It seems that the variable contains a list with one element (the string I want), and not just the string.

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I would guess that you may have accidentally set my-file-variable to the list (such as with (add-to-list 'my-file-variable "~/capture.org") ?). There's no stack trace, so I can't be absolutely certain, but something inside find-file is probably complaining that it has received a list argument rather than a string.

Just re-run your code exactly as you have it and it should work!

If it doesn't, try looking at the stack trace (and maybe update your question). Use M-x toggle-debug-on-error to cause the function to break on the error in that case.

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    Of course. My bad. I c&p'ed code from org-ref that looked like this: ;; see org-ref for use of these variables (setq org-ref-bibliography-notes "~/Dropbox/bibliography/notes.org" org-ref-default-bibliography '("~/Dropbox/bibliography/references.bib") org-ref-pdf-directory "~/Dropbox/bibliography/bibtex-pdfs/"). And org-ref-default-bibliography was a list that I overlooked. Thanks!
    – Alexander Engelhardt
    Nov 13, 2018 at 13:28

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