Re: How can I enable minor mode, always?

[Stefan Monnier]

> I want to always have the highlight-80+ mode enabled. In my .emacs file I
> have:

> (load "~/Emacs/highlight-80+.el")
> (require 'highlight-80+)

The require and the load are two different ways to do the same thing:
you can remove either of them.

> (highlight-80+-mode 1)
> However, when I start Emacs the highlight-80+ is not active, I have to
> manually enable it for each new buffer I open.

>From what you say, it seems that this mode is buffer-local, so you need
to (re)enable it in each buffer rather than enabling it like this in
your .emacs (which will only end up enabling it in the buffer that
happens to be current when your .emacs is executed).

I suggest you try

  (add-hook 'find-file-hook 'highlight-80+-mode)

> My other modes, I want to always have enabled, are enabled as follows (and
> it works for those modes):
> (show-paren-mode 1)
> (setq-default show-trailing-whitespace t)
> (setq column-number-mode t)

> As you can see each mode is enabled is slightly different ways, very
> confusing. Unfortunately none of these methods works for highlight-80+.

Yes, that's unfortunate.  Some settings are controlled by functions
others by variables.  So there are basically two ways to control
a global setting: calling the function with a an argument 1 or -1, or
applying `setq-default' with a value nil or t.  You did it right for the
first two lines:

> (show-paren-mode 1)
> (setq-default show-trailing-whitespace t)

The last line:

> (setq column-number-mode t)

happens to work as well, but I'd recommend you change it to either of
the two (for column-number-mode they both happen to work as well):

  (column-number-mode 1)
or
  (setq-default column-number-mode t)

The use of `setq-default' makes it explicit that you want the setting to
be global rather than per-buffer.


        Stefan