Not liking leaving things imperfect, I recently switched back to Emacs for some tasks. It’s great to do typing, without worrying about mode switching like vim.

A while ago, I wrote a elisp script as a major mode for fish. This is a simple version, with keyword highlight and basic indent.

There was an issue here. It’s about to use autoload to speed up Eamcs’s notorious slow start-up, also to save manual require, and auto-mode-alist, interpreter-mode-alist settings.

There are two ways to use autoload: explicitly execute that, or with a magic comment prepending the call. Check out the document.

The magic comment doesn’t work itself, which bothered me once because I didn’t read the document carefully, which is

Magic comments are the most convenient way to make a function autoload, for
packages installed along with Emacs.

These comments do nothing on their own, but they serve as a guide for the
command update-file-autoloads, which constructs calls to autoload and
arranges to execute them when Emacs is built.

So for manual usage, you have to execute update-file-autoloads, or update-directory-autoloads to generate/update the autoloads file, and load the file in emacs configuration, to make it work.

Well, if the package is a common one, make it into a package repository would save the work, as the package manager would automatically do that. Check out a package in ~/.emacs.d/elpa/, there would be files like fish-mode-autoloads.el.

PS: To make changes and take effect in files in the directory, execute byte-compile-file or byte-recompile-directory after changes, because Emacs will load the .elc file.