Styles Customizing Indentation

6.4: Advanced Customizations

For most users, CC Mode will support their coding styles with very little need for more advanced customizations. Usually, one of the standard styles defined in c-style-alist will do the trick. At most, perhaps one of the syntactic symbol offsets will need to be tweaked slightly, or maybe c-basic-offset will need to be changed. However, some styles require a more flexible framework for customization, and one of the real strengths of CC Mode is that the syntactic analysis model provides just such a framework. This allows you to implement custom indentation calculations for situations not handled by the mode directly.

Note that the style controlling variables can either have global values, or can be buffer local (e.g. different in every buffer). If all the C files you edit tend to have the same style, you might want to keep the variables global. If you tend to edit files with many different styles, you will have to make the variables buffer local. The variable c-style-variables-are-local-p controls this.

When c-style-variables-are-local-p is non-nil, then the style variables will have a different settable value for each buffer, otherwise all buffers will share the same values. By default, its value is nil (i.e. global values). You must set this variable before CC Mode is loaded into your Emacs session, and once the variables are made buffer local, they cannot be made global again (unless you restart Emacs of course!)

Styles

Customizing Indentation