Emacs dummy headers mode without Objective C

Ravi R Kiran — Sun, 14 Jun 2015 19:59:03 GMT

Choosing between C mode and C++ mode in emacs for header files can be a bit of a chore if both types of header files have a .h extension. As usual, a package for solving this problem already exists: dummy-h-mode. One of the heuristics that it uses is to search for an implementation file and then to check the extension of that implementation file for a hint on the mode. This heuristic works very well, but with a minor annoyance that it tries to handle Objective C headers as well. In my use case, I sometimes have purely template-based C++ code and a test implementation in Matlab or octave:

mycode.h
mycode.m

dummy-h-mode unfortunately parses the Matlab/octave file as an Objective C file. Since I do not use Objective C, I used a quick and dirty hack to avoid it:

(defun ravi/do-not-allow-objc (mode-val)
  (if (eq mode-val 'objc-mode)
      nil
    mode-val))
(mapc (lambda (x) (advice-add x :filter-return #'ravi/do-not-allow-objc))
      '(dummy-h-mode-get-major-mode-by-source-file
        ;dummy-h-mode-get-major-mode-by-keywords
        dummy-h-mode-get-major-mode-by-files-directory))

We could simply avoid checking for .m files, but that would involve intrusive changes to dummy-h-mode. Instead, in the code above, we look at the result of obtaining the major mode by one of the file-based methods (checking the implementation, or checking the number of files), and set it to nil if the result is Objective C. When one method returns nil, dummy-h-mode goes on to the next heuristic. In my case, looking at keywords is almost always sufficient since most of my C++ code is in some namespace which clearly indicates the correct mode.

Lex Technica (dummy-headers)

Emacs dummy headers mode without Objective C