GNU Emacs Manual. Node: Variables for C Indent

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20.5.5.5: Variables for C Indentation

This section describes additional variables which control the indentation behavior of C mode and related mode.

c-offsets-alist

Association list of syntactic symbols and their indentation offsets. You should not set this directly, only with c-set-offset. See Changing Indent Style, for details.

c-style-alist

Variable for defining indentation styles; see below.

c-basic-offset

Amount of basic offset used by + and - symbols in c-offsets-alist.

c-special-indent-hook

Hook for user-defined special indentation adjustments. This hook is called after a line is indented by C mode and related modes.

The variable c-style-alist specifies the predefined indentation styles. Each element has form (name variable-setting...), where name is the name of the style. Each variable-setting has the form (variable . value); variable is one of the customization variables used by C mode, and value is the value for that variable when using the selected style.

When variable is c-offsets-alist, that is a special case: value is appended to the front of the value of c-offsets-alist instead of replacing that value outright. Therefore, it is not necessary for value to specify each and every syntactic symbol---only those for which the style differs from the default.

The indentation of lines containing only comments is also affected by the variable c-comment-only-line-offset (see Comments in C).

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