seems that the search results that mentioned guix repl were onto something: Compared to just launching the guile command, guix repl guarantees that all the Guix modules and all its dependencies are available in the search path. - so says the guix manual. ,use (gnu home) has no errors in guix repl. someone had suggested making a script that launches guix repl and having that be the geiser binary. i tried it, maybe too hurriedly, and there were errors... but in realizing this, guess i'll try it again.