The major mode name of emacs-lisp - emacs

I want to load emacs init files faster, so I use the 'eval-after-load.
For example, when I load clojure file, I just put
(eval-after-load 'clojure-mode
'do-something)
It works.
But when I try
(eval-after-load 'emacs-lisp-mode
'do-something)
It doesn't work. I wonder to know the right major mode name of emacs-lisp.
Thanks.

Please read the documentation of eval-after-load:
eval-after-load LIBRARY FORM
This function arranges to evaluate form at the end of loading the file LIBRARY, each time LIBRARY is loaded. If LIBRARY is already loaded, it evaluates form right away. Don't forget to quote form!
[…] LIBRARY can also be a feature (i.e., a symbol), in which case form is evaluated at the end of any file where (provide LIBRARY) is called.
You have to pass the name of the file or library, which defines the major mode, as argument.
While some modes are defined in files of the same name (e.g. clojure-mode in clojure-mode.el), many files a different name, especially if the actually define multiple major modes.
emacs-lisp-mode is defined in lisp-mode.el, along with some other modes for Emacs Lisp editing (e.g. lisp-mode as a generic Lisp language mode, or lisp-interaction-mode for *scratch* buffers).
Hence, use (eval-after-load 'lisp-mode …)
Also, you have to give a single sexp as second argument, so you'll likely want to use (eval-after-load 'lisp-mode '(do-something)), to call the function do-something.
If you are using a snapshot build of Emacs, use with-eval-after-load, i.e. (with-eval-after-load 'lisp-mode (do-something)). It allows for more than a single form, and doesn't require quoting.

Just eval with M-: the variable major-mode. It actually is emacs-lisp-mode.
Note that *scratch* is actually in lisp-interaction-mode.
As to what you're trying to do, use (eval-after-load "lisp-mode").

As explained by #lunaryom, the arg passed to eval-after-load is not a function name but a feature name, which is basically a file name. So you need to find the name of the file from which the function is loaded.
We could provide a feature like eval-after-defun, and indeed it might be a good idea to do so. If you'd like such a thing, ask for it via M-x report-emacs-bug.

Related

How does the "pdf-tools" package overrides "dired-find-file" method?

After installing pdf-tools the dired mode opens the pdf file with PDFView mode as major mode.
(use-package pdf-tools
:ensure t
:config
(pdf-tools-install t))
How does the pdf-tools package be able to accomplish this?
The Help for RET key in dried buffer says it is bound to dired-find-file
RET (translated from ) runs the command dired-find-file (found
in dired-mode-map), which is an interactive compiled Lisp function.
I searched for dired-find-file in pdf-tools installed elisp files and could not find any advice-add's?
Also please explain how can one go about finding arbitrary key bindings like this one?
What it modified is not directly related to dired, but to how Emacs decides to open files in general. The part of the code that is responsible for that is in pdf-tools-install-noverify, itself called by pdf-tools-install. The first two lines of the function are:
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist pdf-tools-auto-mode-alist-entry)
(add-to-list 'magic-mode-alist pdf-tools-magic-mode-alist-entry)
the relevant variables pdf-tools-<auto/magic>-mode-alist-entry being constants defined earlier in the file pdf-tools.el.
You can check the relevant documentation for auto-mode-alist and magic-mode-alist, but to sum up, the former is a mapping from "filenames" (or more precisely, file patterns -- typically, regexps matching file extensions) to major modes, and the latter is a mapping from "beginning of a buffer" to a major mode (see also this wikipedia page on magic numbers/file signatures).
As to how one can determine that: because it is not directly related to key bindings/advices/redefinition of functions, the only "general" option is to explore the "call stack" ! The package tells you to put (pdf-tools-install) somewhere in your init file to activate the package, so you can try to see what this function actually does -- and going a bit further, you see that it is essentially a wrapper around pdf-tools-install-noverify, which does the real job of setting everything up.

Emacs - How to wrap selection in org-mode source code block?

I have a bunch of elisp and other code with some notes i wanted to reformat to be more organized, and i found that having to type
#+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp ... #+END_SRC
all the time around what i want, is taking a bit longer than expected...
So what i wanted to do instead is to wrap/or put the selected content (with C-space) and put it in a template source code block for org-mode (in my case it's mostly elisp code, but i plan to use it for other things maybe)
How could i do this in emacs or in elisp?
There is a new templating mechanism in recent Org mode (>= 9.0 IIRC) that allows you tor wrap a region in a block: after selecting the region in the usual manner, you say C-c C-, s. You still have to type the emacs-lisp part though. That's the disadvantage. The advantage is that it is general enough to allow you to wrap a region in any kind of block. In your case, I think the disadvantage outweighs the advantage, so I would go with the wrap-region method in the other answer, but this one is good to know as well.
You can try wrap-region. It will allow you to define what type of string you want to wrap around a selection.
Put this in your init.el and evaluate it.
(wrap-region-global-mode t)
(wrap-region-add-wrapper "#+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp\n" "#+END_SRC" "#" 'org-mode)
Then, while you are editing your org files, you can select a block of text and type #, which will wrap it with your string. You can change the # to another character that will do the wrapping.
There is a feature in org-mode to do exactly that. It's like a snippet of some sort where you enter <eland hit TAB, the < char is here to say we're gonna use a template and the el part tells which template to use. But of course, you have to configure it first.
For that, you can just add this to an org-mode file or to your init.el file :
#+begin_src emacs-lisp
;; This is needed as of Org 9.2
(require 'org-tempo)
(add-to-list `org-structure-template-alist `("sh" . "src shell"))
(add-to-list `org-structure-template-alist `("el" . "src emacs-lisp"))
(add-to-list `org-structure-template-alist `("py" . "src python"))
#+end_src
There a bunch of way to use this, it's actually more useful than just use it as a template, you can go check the documentation here.

Emacs package customization and autoloads

I am adding Customize support for a package that provides a couple of global mode-independent commands. As I do not want to load the package unless the user explicitly invokes the commands through keybindings yet I want to allow customization right after the user installs the package, I tried to use code like:
;;;###autoload
(defcustom foo-bar nil
"bar setting for for"
:type boolean)
;;;###autoload
(defun foo-command-1 () ...)
With that after I install the package I can invoke foo-command-1. I can also use customize-variable to set and save foo-bar. However, when I start Emacs again, the value of foo-bar is reset to default and Emacs complains that the value is changed outside customize.
AFAICS the reason for this is that the code that Emacs puts into the autoloads file for defcustom assumes that it will run before Emacs calls custom-set-variables in the init.el. However, this is not the case with a package which autoloads are run after the init file.
Is this a known problem? To workaround I replaced the above with something like:
;;;###autoload
(unless (fboundp 'foo-command-1)
(defcustom foo-bar nil
"bar setting for for"
:type boolean))
;;;###autoload
(defun foo-command-1 () ...)
That copies the whole defcustom definition into the autoloads and prevents running it the second time when the package is loaded for real. This works and saved options are properly restored. Still I am puzzled why ###autoload for defcustom does not do the right thing on its own.
Yes, what you did is a reasonable way to accomplish what you want. If you want to autoload a defcustom and you care about when it will be evaluated relative to other code, then you need to control that timing in some way. The way you chose is reasonable.
A user's init file can load custom-file at any point the user chooses. And if no custom-file is used it is still not sure at what point the part of the init-file code that is managed by Customize will be evaluated with respect to other parts that might depend on values that it sets.
As a general rule, you don't want to autoload variables.
Yes, it's a known problem, and there's no really good solution to it (each solution I could come up with had its own set of bugs/misbehaviors), which is why all I can say is "don't autoload variables, please".
Even in the case where it happens to do what you want, it's undesirable in my experience. It just has too many quirks and corner cases.

What Emacs Lisp function is to `require` as `autoload` is to `load`?

I am trying to program GNU Emacs 23 to issue require commands lazily, on demand, instead of up front in my .emacs file. If I wanted to delay the execution of a load command, I could use autoload. But require and load take different sorts of arguments.
Is there a predefined function that does for require the same job that autoload does for load? And if not, what tools would people recommend that I use to roll my own?
There is not difference between require and load with regards to autoload. require is just a frontend to load, which more or less comes down to:
(defun require (feature &optional filename noerror)
(unless (featurep feature)
(let ((filename (or filename (symbol-name feature))))
(load filename noerror))))
As you can see, the symbol name given to require is equal to the filename given to load. As a matter of fact, the first (require 'foo) evaluated in an Emacs session is equivalent to (load "foo").
Thus, you can just use (auto-load 'foo-function "foo") for foo-function from the library foo, that you can load with (require 'foo).
One more answer to help clarify (this was a little verbose for a comment):
autoload says "if this function isn't already defined, then load this file (if and when the function is called)."
require says "if this library isn't already loaded, then load this file (immediately)."
Note in particular that you don't need to use require to load a library; that's simply the way you ensure that you don't load it again (assuming you don't want to do that). The (provide 'FEATURE) expression in the library will be evaluated no matter how the library was loaded, which lets any future require know that it doesn't need to do anything.
It's a similar situation for autoload -- if the file has already been loaded (and therefore the function in question properly defined), then the autoload no longer has any effect.
What kind of "demand" do you have in mind for your "on demand"?
If a given command or other function needs (or soft-needs) a given library, then that function itself can use (require 'foo) or (require 'foo nil t). The library will be loaded on demand from that function.
Consider also whether you might need to load the file more than once, i.e., reload it in some situations, whether or not it has already been loaded.
For #2, for instance, my code that uses a library of Lisp macros, icicles-mac.el does not just use require, because I want to make sure that if a user gets a new version of that library (e.g., downloads a new source version and byte-compiles it) then that new version is used whenever s?he byte-compiles another library that needs it. (This is important -- when a library of macros changes, other libraries that use those macros generally need to be recompiled after loading the new macros file.) For that, instead of just (require 'icicles-mac) I use this:
(eval-when-compile
(or (condition-case nil
(load-library "icicles-mac") ; Use load-library to ensure latest .elc.
(error nil))
(require 'icicles-mac))) ; Require, so can load separately if not on `load-path'.

Emacs c-mode autoloading failed

I want to load my file named "my-c-setup.el" when the c-mode is loading. So, I'm using the function "autoload".
With my python setup, it works well :
lang.el
(autoload 'python-mode "my-python-setup" "" t)
my-python-setup.el
(require 'python)
; ...
I'm trying to do the same with the c-mode, but i does not work :
lang.el
(autoload 'c-mode "my-c-setup" "" t)
my-c-setup.el
(setq c-basic-offset 4)
; ...
When I try to open a file in c-mode (test.c for example), I have the following error :
File mode specification error: (error "Autoloading failed to define function c-mode")
Autoload is not what you're looking for. What it does is simply load some code the first time it is needed, which is a handy way to extend Emacs' functionality while still keeping the start-up time low.
To solve your problem, we gotta think about what you really want to do: do you simply want some of your code to be loaded at some point, or do you want buffer-local customizations for ever buffer that is in c-mode?
If you simply want Emacs to load your code at start-up, either put your code directly into your .emacs file or use load-file or require instead of autoload:
load-file simply takes a file name, loads the lisp code in that file and evaluates it. So if your code is in a file named "/path/to/my-c-setup.el", you could put the following line in your .emacs, and the code will be loaded on every start-up:
(load-file "/path/to/my-c-setup.el")
Perhaps you don't want to give the absolute path name for every file you load. In that case, you could use the function load-library instead which is similar to load-file but tries to find the given filename in any of the directories stored in the variable load-path:
(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to")
(load-library "my-c-setup.el")
The advantage is that you have to do the add-to-list part only once, and all subsequent calls to load-library will be able to find code in that directory.
An alternative way is the provide/require mechanism: you can make your .el-file "provide" some feature by putting a (provide 'feature) call in it, e.g.
(provide 'my-c-mode-customizations)
Then put an according (require 'feature) in your .emacs file, and your code will be loaded as well:
(require 'my-c-mode-customizations)
However, if you want your code only be loaded when c-mode is activated on a buffer, the way to achieve that is through Emacs' Hook mechanism:
A hook is a variable where you can
store a function or functions to be
called on a particular occasion by an
existing program.
Most major modes provide a customizable hook variable to which you can add functions that will be called whenever the major mode is invoked. For instance, c-mode provides c-mode-hook. In order for your own customizations to be called whenever c-mode is turned on for a buffer, put them in a function, say, my-c-mode-customizations and add the following line to your .emacs file:
(add-hook 'c-mode-hook 'my-c-mode-customizations)
Of course, you still need autoload for Emacs to actually find the definition of that function.
Lisp's autoload does not call a function when a file is loaded but tells lisp that the function is available and that the given file provides it. Whenever someone calls the (not yet defined) function, the file is loaded.
I think that c-mode is already defined and thus fails to re-register.
Autoload doesn't do what you think it does.
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/elisp/html_node/Autoload.html
What you probably want are mode-hooks or eval-after-load.
See eval-after-load vs. mode hook for the difference between the two.