How can I find out all the modes in Emacs, whether major or minor?
reddit / emacs

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steve-ddit · 2022-10-27 20:40



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big_lentil · 2022-10-27 21:37

You can do C-h f and then search with a regexp

E.g. with emacs -q, C-h f, typing *mode and pressing tab works, but
there are some false positives and it seems like how the regexp is
interpreted depends on the completion framework you're using. With
helm I can get a more accurate list with .mode$, but seems like *mode$
doesn't work with emacs -q

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J-ky · 2022-10-27 23:42

C-h m or C-h b should do what you want.

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andyjda · 2022-10-27 23:44

If you want to know all the modes active in the current buffer, do M-x
describe-mode, or C-h m.

If you want to know all of the available modes, then the other reply
is what you’re looking for, but the amount of information you’d get is
quite large and non-descriptive

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[deleted] · 2022-10-27 23:44

[deleted]

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sr105 · 2022-10-28 03:13

In the last month, someone posted a small package that not only lists
all of the modes but hierarchically, too.
https://github.com/jdtsmith/mode-minder

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arthurno1 · 2022-10-28 03:16

> How can I find out all the modes in Emacs, whether major or minor?

Depends on what do you mean with "all the modes".

To find all the modes in a buffer, as already suggested, use C-h m.

To find all the modes currently loaded in Emacs, you will have to do
some acrobatics by going through all the symbols in global symbol
table, check [mapatoms function](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ma
nual/html_node/elisp/Creating-Symbols.html), then you will have to
check some plist properties for each symbol. I am not sure if it is
even possible to find them all that way, or how reliable it would be.

Finally there are modes avialable in libraries but not loaded. Minor-
modes that features are usually autoloaded, buI am not sure if all
minor-modes are autoloaded?

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holgerschurig · 2022-10-28 05:09

Get the source of Emacs,and recursively grep for define-minor-mode and
define-major-mode there.

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steve-ddit · 2022-10-28 07:20

We can consider that "File Modes" is always associated with a major-
mode?

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big_lentil · 2022-10-28 11:54

Looks like this is how mode-minder does it

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arthurno1 · 2022-10-28 14:07

Possible. Never heard of that package so no idea, but you are probably
correct..

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JDRiverRun · 2022-10-29 03:27

Yep [that's it](https://github.com/jdtsmith/mode-
minder/blob/0746fbe3205f18a50c1314512db9573d10df7f87/mode-
minder.el#L77-L81).

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[deleted] · 2022-10-29 03:30

[deleted]

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JDRiverRun · 2022-10-29 21:12

>Finally there are modes avialable in libraries but not loaded. Minor-
modes that features are usually autoloaded, buI am not sure if all
minor-modes are autoloaded?

mode-minder works around this by loading all modes it is aware of.
If you are using native-comp, this is also a nice way to get
"everything compiled".  I recently added a few tweaks to find even
more minor modes.  Many were created before define-minor-mode macro
existed, so are not on minor-modes-list.

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bikenaga · 2022-10-29 23:47

There's a list
[here](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/List_Of_Major_And_Minor_Modes)
for emacs 24. The description notes that the list was obtained by
running `emacs -Q`, then doing `M-x rgrep` and searching on `define-
derived-mode` and `define-minor-mode`. You have to do this in a
directory containing the elisp source.

I tried this in the top level `emacs` directory where I built emacs
29, and I got 600 - 700 matches for each. However, the output was
pretty messy, and there were surely duplicates. Maybe someone who is
interested can try this and figure out a good way to clean up the
output.

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arthurno1 · 2022-10-31 00:14

I didn't want to answer before I had time to check your app. It looks
very nice indeed! It does find even none autoloaded minor modes, like
emms-playing-time-display-mode and alike. Good job.

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arthurno1 · 2022-10-31 00:18

I just answered in another comment, it does look nice. Though if you
wish to compile everything, why not just M-:

    (native-compile-async package-user-dir t)

and

    (native-compile-async source-directory t)

Or when you build Emacs:

    $ make NATIVE_FULL_AOT=1 -jN