Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd Edition

Customizing Existing Modes

Now that you understand some of what goes into programming a major mode, you may decide you want to customize an existing one. Luckily, in most cases, you don't have to worry about changing any mode's existing Lisp code to do this; you may not even have to look at the code. All Emacs major modes have "hooks" for letting you add your own code to them. Appropriately, these are called mode-hooks. Every built-in major mode in Emacs has a mode hook called mode-name -hook, where mode-name is the name of the mode or the function that invokes it. For example, C mode has c-mode-hook, shell mode has shell-mode-hook, etc.

What exactly is a hook? It is a variable whose value is some Lisp code to run when the mode is invoked. When you invoke a mode, you run a Lisp function that typically does many things (e.g., sets up key bindings for special commands, creates buffers and local variables, etc.); the last thing a mode-invoking function usually does is run the mode's hook if it exists. Thus, hooks are "positioned" to give you a chance to override anything the mode's code may have set up. For example, any key bindings you define override the mode's default bindings.

We saw earlier that Lisp code can be used as the value of a Lisp variable; this use comes in handy when you create hooks. Before we show you exactly how to create a hook, we need to introduce yet another Lisp primitive function: lambda. lambda is very much like defun in that it is used to define functions; ...