I am defining a new major mode, foo-mode
, which is closely and only associated with .foo
files. Should foo-mode.el
fiddle with auto-mode-alist
to add this association, or is that the user's responsibility?
2 Answers
Note that if your library is intended to be installed via package.el (or similar) and you have included an autoload cookie for foo-mode
, and you choose to implement the auto-mode-alist
manipulation, then you will want to use an autoload cookie for that as well. Otherwise the user would need to either load your library before visiting a *.foo
file, or else write their own auto-mode-alist
entry.
I don't think there's a hard and fast rule about this. I suspect that now that ELPA is pretty standard, it's more common for packages to update auto-mode-alist
automatically, to streamline the installation process. I'd say just use your own judgement, and be sure to still provide equivalent manual installation instructions in your commentary.
I'd say yes. If the user has installed foo-mode
, they have installed it to use with .foo
files. When I run emacs -Q
, there are 184 items in the list (including .org
, .java
, .xml
, .letter
, and more, so it's not kept too small.