Is there a best practice around lazily loading modes when encountering a relevant file extension?
At this point I have roughly 25 different Emacs modes installed, and startup has become slow. For example, although it's great to have clojure-mode at the ready, I rarely use it, and I want to avoid loading it at all unless I open a file with extension .clj. Such a "lazy require" functionality seems like the right way do mode configuration in general..
I found nothing online, so I've taken a crack at it myself.
Instead of:
(require 'clojure-mode)
(require 'tpl-mode)
I have this:
(defun lazy-require (ext mode)
(add-hook
'find-file-hook
`(lambda ()
(when (and (stringp buffer-file-name)
(string-match (concat "\\." ,ext "\\'") buffer-file-name))
(require (quote ,mode))
(,mode)))))
(lazy-require "soy" 'soy-mode)
(lazy-require "tpl" 'tpl-mode)
This seems to work (I'm an elisp newbie so comments are welcome!), but I'm unnerved about finding nothing written about this topic online. Is this a reasonable approach?
The facility you want is called autoloading. The clojure-mode
source file, clojure-mode.el, includes a comment for how to arrange this:
;; Add these lines to your .emacs: ;; (autoload 'clojure-mode "clojure-mode" "A major mode for Clojure" t) ;; (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.clj$" . clojure-mode))
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