I use Pymacs to load Ropemacs and Rope with the following lines in my .emacs as described here. (autoload 'pymacs-load "pymacs" nil t) (pymacs-load "ropemacs" "rope-") It however slowdown the startup of Emacs significantly as it takes a while to load Ropemacs. I tried the following line instead but that loads Ropemacs everytime a Python file opened... (add-hook 'python-mode-hook (lambda () (pymacs-load "ropemacs" "rope-"))) Is there a way to perform the pymacs-load when opening a Python file but only if ropemacs and rope aren't loaded yet?