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I'm trying to make this little convenience function work:

(defun my-make-hook (when procedure)
     (let ((hook-symbol (intern (concat
                                 (substring (symbol-name when) 1)
                                 "-"
                                 (symbol-name procedure)
                                 "-hook"))))
       (unless (boundp hook-symbol)
         (set hook-symbol nil)
         (advice-add procedure when (lambda (&rest _) (run-hooks hook-symbol)))
         hook-symbol)))

But I'm getting an error that the interned symbol is void, and I believe I may actually be somehow setting the value of the symbol hook-symbol itself, rather than the symbol that hook-symbol evaluates to.

EDIT: I'm calling it with, e.g., (my-make-hook :after 'load-theme).

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  • When are you getting that error? How are you calling my-make-hook? – Tyler Feb 27 '17 at 17:43
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    What @Stefan said. Alternatively, use `(lambda (&rest _) (run-hooks ',hook-symbol)). (That's a backquote before the lambda.) – Drew Feb 27 '17 at 21:25
  • Better not create any around-load-theme-hooks. – politza Feb 27 '17 at 21:28
  • @Drew, would that replace hook-symbol in the lambda with the newly created symbol (say, after-load-theme-hook) instead of making the lambda refer to the lexical variable hook-symbol? – Keith Feb 27 '17 at 21:52
  • @politza, good call. So far my use cases have been :before and :after. I haven't used any abnormal hooks. My original code threw an error if when wasn't :before or :after, but I omitted that to make the procedure more clear. – Keith Feb 27 '17 at 21:55
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My crystal ball says that the above code is written in a file that does not have the magic cookie -*- lexical-binding:t -*-, and hence the let-binding of hook-symbol is dynamic rather than lexical, and by the time the advice is run, that variable doesn't exist any more, so you get a void-variable error.

Hence: place ;; -*- lexical-binding:t -*- on the first line of the file in which you wrote your function, then re-load the file, and that should hopefully fix it.

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  • Thanks, @Stefan. I was only considering that (set hook-symbol nil) is evaluated inside the let form, and forgot that the lambda needs to refer back to the local variables. – Keith Feb 27 '17 at 21:45
  • For whatever reason after-load-theme-hook still isn't working, but with lexical binding the procedure works perfectly for all my other hooks. – Keith Feb 27 '17 at 21:57
  • You might like to post another question for that after-load-them-hook case, where you can give more details about "isn't working". Maybe the problem is simply that the load-theme function signals an error, so it never ends up running the "after" part. Or maybe advice-add is called after the load-theme function is called. – Stefan Feb 27 '17 at 22:28
  • It seems that setting lexical-binding to t makes the hook work, but only in the buffer where it was created. – Keith Feb 28 '17 at 12:55

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