ProgMode

‘prog-mode’ is a major mode provided by Emacs. Typically, it is not used directly, instead many programming-related major modes are derived from this mode.

A user can add things to ‘prog-mode-hook’, which are executed for all programming modes (that are derived from ‘prog-mode’).

One benefit of using this mode is that global minor modes no longer have to maintain a long list of suitable major modes. Instead, they can simply check if a mode is derived from one of the base modes.

Other often used base modes include ‘special-mode’ and ‘text-mode’.

Examples

You can define a new major mode derived from ‘prog-mode’ using the following:

    (define-derived-mode alpha-mode prog-mode "Alpha"
        "Major mode for editing alpha files."
        ...)

You can check if the major mode of the current buffer is derived from ‘prog-mode’ using:

    (derived-mode-p 'prog-mode)

A global minor mode that will be enabled for all ‘prog-mode’ modes can be defined using:

    (define-global-minor-mode my-global-mode my-mode
      (lambda ()
        (when (derived-mode-p 'prog-mode)
          (my-mode 1))))

ProgrammingModes