Emacs buttons – an introduction for the somewhat impatient

Working out how to make buttons work in emacs took rather too much effort – I suspect I was just being slow. However, I thought I’d write a tiny how-to for anyone else who tries to do this:

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Below is a prototypical emacs lisp function call to create a new button in your text between characters beg and end is:

(defun f (button)
    (call-interactively 'find-file))

(make-button beg end 'action 'f 'follow-link t)

Note the following:

• The properties are defined via a variable number of arguments . It does does not take a list.
• Removing the follow-link property would cause left mouse-clicks on the link to have no effects
• f must take a single argument otherwise this will fail.

For more on emacs buttons see:

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/elisp.html#Buttons

If you want to make your button more anonymous (so that changing the function value associated with f has no deleterious results) you can use the following

(make-button beg end 'action
    (lambda (button) (call-interactively 'find-file))
    'follow-link t)