Often when working on some Emacs package you’d want to create some logic that’s conditional on the major mode of a particular Emacs buffer. There are several ways check the major mode, but some are definitely better than others.

Every buffer has a buffer-local variable named major-mode that you can check directly. If you evaluate the symbol major-mode in a scratch buffer or an Emacs Lisp REPL (M-x ielm), you’ll get list-interaction-mode and inferior-emacs-lisp-mode. You can easily do this for any buffer by pressing M-: (M-x eval-expression) and typing major-mode in the minibuffer when prompted to do so. Making this a bit more generic can easily obtain the major mode of any buffer like this:

;; option 1
(with-current-buffer buffer
  major-mode)

;; option 2
(buffer-local-value 'major-mode buffer)

So, how would you compare major-buffer to something? As it’s a symbol, the first thing that comes to mind is using eq:

(if (eq major-mode 'clojure-mode)
    (do-something))

While this generally works, there’s one subtle problem with it - you’re doing an exact match for a particular mode, but major modes can be inherited by other modes. Consider clojure-mode - it’s the parent of modes like clojurescript-mode and clojurec-mode, and it inherits from prog-mode (which is the parent mode of most programming major modes). Enter derived-mode-p:

;; assuming we're in a ClojureScript buffer and the current major mode is clojurescript-mode
(derived-mode-p 'clojurescript-mode)
;; => t

(derived-mode-p 'clojure-mode)
;; => t

(derived-mode-p 'prog-mode)
;; => t

As you can see from the examples above, derived-mode-p understands the major mode inheritance hierarchy, which makes it the best solution for most cases when you’d want to do something depending on the major mode. Unfortunately I’ve seen too many times eq used when derived-mode-p would be a better option, which is why I decided to write this short article.

That’s all I’ve had for you today! Keep hacking!