I have tried to search Google and look in the manual, but still cannot find how to get major mode of a buffer object. Can you help me with an example or a reference. Thanks
only solution I could find was to query major-mode after changing the buffer and then changing back to original buffer. Is there a better way to do it?
Is there a problem with that?
(defun buffer-mode (buffer-or-string)
"Returns the major mode associated with a buffer."
(with-current-buffer buffer-or-string
major-mode))
with-current-buffer
will restore your buffer when it returns.
For current buffer:
(message "%s" major-mode)
A simple way to do this is to use the buffer-local-value
function since major-mode
is a buffer-local variable:
(buffer-local-value 'major-mode (get-buffer "*scratch*"))
Just extending from previous answers - call with no arguments to get the current buffer's mode:
(defun buffer-mode (&optional buffer-or-name)
"Returns the major mode associated with a buffer.
If buffer-or-name is nil return current buffer's mode."
(buffer-local-value 'major-mode
(if buffer-or-name (get-buffer buffer-or-name) (current-buffer))))
E.g. in *scratch* buffer:
(buffer-mode) => 'lisp-interaction-mode
(buffer-mode "tasks.org") => 'org-mode
Well, describe-mode takes an optional buffer argument, but that displays the help... and I'm not exactly sure what it returns...
But that's the best I could find in a brief search... sorry...