Re: Elisp newbie trying a derived mode (clarifying intent)

[Mathias Dahl]

"davex" <dmagill@attglobal.net> writes:

> let me clarify the above--I'd like to make this simple to use
> regularly, hence have a single keystroke call
> dired-do-shell-command, with the correct shell command (to write out
> the filename) hard-coded-- i suppose i could do this as a keyboard
> macro, but if I can do a derived mode in a clean concise way, I
> could apply this skill elsewhere.  Am I on the right track? Is a
> derived mode a common useful solution?

To me it seems overkill to create a new mode for this. Just create
your new defuns and bind a free key to one of them. You can add a hook
to dired mode that binds this key each time dired starts.

I have this in my .emacs:

;; if dired's already loaded, then the keymap will be bound
(if (boundp 'dired-mode-map)
    ;; we're good to go; just add our bindings
    (my-dired-init)
  ;; it's not loaded yet, so add our bindings to the load-hook
  (add-hook 'dired-load-hook 'my-dired-init))

`my-dired-init' does a lot of extra stuff I want in dired, like these
bindings, for example:

  ...
  (define-key mode-specific-map "xp" 'dired-w32-open-files)
  (define-key dired-mode-map [return] 'joc-dired-single-buffer)
  ...

YMMV, of course.