symbol's value as variable is void: command, when using ibuffer-sidebar

Question

I installed ibuffer-sidebar (https://github.com/jojojames/ibuffer-sidebar) and added the following to my ~/.emacs.d/init.el:

(use-package "ibuffer-sidebar.el")
(require 'ibuffer-sidebar)
(setq ibuffer-sidebar-use-custom-font t)
(setq ibuffer-sidebar-face `(:family "Helvetica" :height 120))

After doing this, all helm commands fail. E.g. helm-find-files says In Find FIles source: helm-find-fules-get-candidates (void-variable command). Other helm commands just say symbol's value as variable is void: command. I'm a newbie, very excited about emacs.

Answer 1

Normally this is not how people install packages, typically if you want to use use-package, you want to specify everything inside the macro, and what you might be seeing is the spillover into helm, because it's initialised after ibuffer-sidebar.

I would suggest you read up the documentation, and as an example of how to use use-package here's the version of your init.el.

((use-package ibuffer-sidebar
  :ensure t
  :config
  (custom-set-variables
    '(ibuffer-sidebar-use-custom-font t)
    '(ibuffer-sidebar-face (:family "Helvetica" :height 120))))

This might not fix the error that you're having, but it's definitely the proper way to use-package.

As for the error message you're receiving, it's a sign that the macro is not getting a command as a value (in lisp, functions are values too), so my best guess would be that it fails to initialise ibuffer-sidebar and tries to run one of its provided commands, but fails.

See if this fixes the issue.