CODEWITHSUNDEEP
emacselispconfig
flooose
flooose

Reputation: 529

highlight-indentation emacs startup

I've been learning emacs and lisp right, so I'm sure I'm missing something, but I'm trying to get highlight-indentation to work when I start emacs.

I've got the highlight-indentation.el file in my emacs path and after startup, I can do

M-x highlight-indentation

and all works well, but how do I get this to work on startup. I thought putting

(highlight-indentation)

in my .emacs file would work, but it didn't. Is this because highlight-indentation is an interactive function?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1428

Answers (3)

Matt Darling
Matt Darling

Reputation: 61

highlight-indentation.el actually creates a minor mode that will automatically highlight the indentation at all times, appropriately called highlight-indentation-mode. You can see the relevant functions under the sections that say

;;;###autoload

namely,

define-minor-mode highlight-indentation-mode

and

define-minor-mode highlight-indentation-current-column-mode

To use them, add a hook like Lindydancer suggested, but instead of creating a new hook that calls the highlight-indentation function, simply write:

(add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode-hook 'highlight-indentation-mode)

I kind of prefer the (rather wordy) highlight-indentation-current-column-mode, which just highlights the column the cursor is on. It's a bit cleaner, but still shows you the relationship between different levels of the code.

Edit: I'm two years late to updating this, but for future Internet wanderers who want to get highlight-indentation-mode working for all programming langagues, you can do this:

(add-hook 'prog-mode-hook 'highlight-indentation-mode)

Upvotes: 3

Lindydancer
Lindydancer

Reputation: 26094

The function is only applied to the current buffer. I would recommend using a hook like the following. Functions added to major mode hooks are executed when the major mode is enabled for a particular buffer.

(defun my-emacs-lisp-mode-hook ()
  (highlight-indentation))
(add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode-hook 'my-emacs-lisp-mode-hook)

Upvotes: 5

choroba
choroba

Reputation: 241748

It really depends on what the highlight-indentation does. Check whether its effects are not visible in the *scratch* buffer.

Upvotes: 0

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