Save and restore variable

Question

I am working on Spacemacs which gives you the ability toggle between Emacs "holy-mode" and Vim "evil-mode". However the evil-escape minor mode is still enabled. I am trying to find some way to disable evil-escape in the holy-mode setup function and then restore its previous state (enabled/disabled) in holy-mode's teardown function. I tried this but it didn't work.

  ;; setup
  (setq evil-escape-mode-set (symbol-value 'evil-escape-mode))
  (evil-escape-mode -1)

  ;; teardown
  (when (evil-escape-mode-set)
     (evil-escape-mode))

but the teardown doesn't seem to work. How can I accomplish this?

Answer 1

It's unclear to me just what you are trying to do.

But it looks like you are setting a variable and then expecting it to be used as a function.

Emacs Lisp is a "Lisp 2", which means that you can have a variable and a function with the same name, and they are totally unrelated, by default. It also means that if you want to invoke a function-valued variable you need to use something like funcall or apply, not just have that symbol as the car of a list that is evaluated.

I think all you really want to do is this:

(when evil-escape-mode-set ...

instead of this:

(when (evil-escape-mode-set) ...