Emacs Haskell Mode has the following useful feature: when "Haskell -> Load File" is used to load a file into GHCi from Emacs, Haskell Mode automatically looks for a "*.cabal" file in an attempt to find the project directory. When Haskell Mode finds the *.cabal file, it fails to check whether it has found a file or a folder. As a result, if I want to load a Haskell file that has no corresponding .cabal file, then Haskell Mode locates my "~/.cabal" *folder* and assumes that it's my project directory. I have a "~/.cabal" folder because Cabal-Install puts it there. Cabal-Install is part of Haskell's new package management system. Now I don't know very much Emacs Lisp, but I figured out a fix for the problem. In Haskell-Mode-2.4, in the file haskell-cabal.el, I changed the function "haskell-cabal-find-file" so that it explicitly checks to make sure that any *.cabal file is in fact a file and not a folder. I don't know if comparing the first letter of the file mode string to 'd' is the right way to diferentiate a folder from a file, but so far it appears to work for me, so I thought I'd share it. (defun haskell-cabal-find-file () "Return a buffer visiting the cabal file of the current directory, or nil." (catch 'found (let ((user (nth 2 (file-attributes default-directory))) ;; Abbreviate, so as to stop when we cross ~/. (root (abbreviate-file-name default-directory)) files) (while (and root (equal user (nth 2 (file-attributes root)))) (let ((files (directory-files root 'full "\\.cabal\\'"))) (if (and files (not (equal 100 (aref (nth 8 (file-attributes (car files))) 0)))) (throw 'found (find-file-noselect (car files))) (if (equal root (setq root (file-name-directory (directory-file-name root)))) (setq root nil)))) nil))))