Today we're finishing off our emoji project. This video covers two quick things.

The first is how we can make the mode use either of our replacement methods - one that actually replaces the text with the emoji and the other that uses text properties to overlay the emoji without changing the text.

This is done with a variable that we can set telling us which function to call. We used one named emoji-replace-by-insert. If it's t (true) we use the replace method, if it's nil we use the overlay one.

We could just use an if statement in our define minor mode but I decided to use this as an opportunity to show how we can assign a function to a variable which might be new to some readers/viewers.

Let's say we want to create a variable named my_function_variable and have it stand in for, let's say the built in 1+ function that increments a value. We could do a simple assignment:

  (setq my_function_variable #'1+)

Unfortunately, in Elisp we can't just call our new variable as a function straight out but rather must call it using funcall, like this:

  (funcall my_variable_function 5) ;; this returns 6, just like (1+ 5) would

In other languages we could just call the function directly. In the case of defining our mode, we can just throw in the variable once we assign it. Here's the code:

(define-minor-mode emoji-replace-mode
  "fill in the docstring later"
  :lighter " ER"
  (let ((func (if emoji-replace-by-insert
		  #'emoji-replace-insert
		#'emoji-replace-overlay)))
  (if emoji-replace-mode
      (add-hook 'after-change-functions func nil t)
    (remove-hook 'after-change-functions func))))

We use the let form to assign our variable func to the appropriate function and then just pass along func when we use add-hook and remove-hook.

That's it.

The other thing we cover involves cleaning up our variables. In earlier videos we used setq but also showed defvar with the practical difference being that defvar had a docstring.

In this video, we look at defcustom which looks like defvar but also lets you change the variable value using emacs' customize-variable command and interface. Further, if we do change the variable this way and save it through the interface, it will save the change in your init.el file for future use. It's a nice touch when making a complete "package."

That's it for this project. I might do one more on setting things up for installation using straight or something similar. If not, it'll be on to the next project which I think will be a thesaurus moed.