problems with ediff-startup-hooks

[bhenz]

Hi all,

I running emacs 21.4.1. I'm trying to do some fancy ediff stuff. 

Actually not terribly fancy, I just want to invoke it from the command line with parmeters similar to "diff", specifically using the -L option to give more descriptive names to the buffers. Currently I can ediff two files by doing the following...

emacs --eval='(progn (setq ediff-diff-options "-wbB") (ediff-files "file1" "file2"))'

Maybe there's an easier/better way?

ANYWAY,

The path I'm currently on requires me to hook into the "ediff-startup-hooks" with the following code in my .emacs file...

(require 'ediff)

;; Get rid of the annoying little (separate) ediff window and
;; turn it into a 3rd pane in the main emacs window.
(setq ediff-window-setup-function 'ediff-setup-windows-plain)

;; Put files side-by-side
;(setq ediff-split-window-function 'split-window-horizontally)

(defun my-ediff-startup-hooks ()
    (set-buffer ediff-buffer-A)
    (rename-buffer "bobA")
    (set-buffer ediff-buffer-B)
    (rename-buffer "bobB")
)

(add-hook 'ediff-startup-hooks 'my-ediff-startup-hooks)

OK, so this is just baby-step code because clearly "bobA" and "bobB" are not useful, but I can't even get THIS to work! I even tried inserting a line I knew would fail in the defined function (something like (undefined_bob_qwerty)) and I never got a complaint when I fired up a new instance of ediff.

(but I know it was picking up my changes to .emacs because if I made a syntax error then it would warn me about that.)

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks,
Bob