Programmatically setting major mode of buffer with emacs lisp

Question

I wish to programmatically set the major mode of a buffer. I have dug into the documentation, and the function set-buffer-major-mode only takes a buffer object. I am essentially looking for a function that takes a buffer object and a mode name.

Alternatively, I also tried using auto-mode-alist by forcing the buffer to have a file extension but that did not work even when I called the set-buffer-major-mode function.

Thanks for all the help!

Lindydancer · Accepted Answer · 2018-05-15 09:15:53Z

16

The basics are that if you want to switch to my mode, all you have to do is to call my-mode, for example:

(with-current-buffer buffer
  (my-mode))

If you have a buffer and a variable bound to the major mode, you could use the following:

(with-current-buffer buffer
  (funcall the-mode-i-want))

Again, if you have a variable bound to a string, you have to convert it to a symbol using intern:

(with-current-buffer buffer
  (funcall (intern the-name-of-the-mode-i-want)))

edited May 15, 2018 at 9:15

answered Oct 17, 2014 at 7:03

Lindydancer

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1 Comment

Lindydancer Over a year ago

@azzamsa, you should either use (my-mode) or (funcall a-variable-holding-the-major-mode), but you should not mix the two variants.

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