Subroutines of Visiting

The find-file-noselect function uses two important subroutines which are sometimes useful in user Lisp code: create-file-buffer and after-find-file. This section explains how to use them.

Function: create-file-buffer filename

This function creates a suitably named buffer for visiting filename, and returns it. It uses filename (sans directory) as the name if that name is free; otherwise, it appends a string such as `<2>' to get an unused name. See also section Creating Buffers.

Please note: create-file-buffer does not associate the new buffer with a file and does not select the buffer. It also does not use the default major mode.

(create-file-buffer "foo")
     => #<buffer foo>
(create-file-buffer "foo")
     => #<buffer foo<2>>
(create-file-buffer "foo")
     => #<buffer foo<3>>

This function is used by find-file-noselect. It uses generate-new-buffer (see section Creating Buffers).

Function: after-find-file &optional error warn

This function sets the buffer major mode, and parses local variables (see section How Emacs Chooses a Major Mode). It is called by find-file-noselect and by the default revert function (see section Reverting).

If reading the file got an error because the file does not exist, but its directory does exist, the caller should pass a non-nil value for error. In that case, after-find-file issues a warning: `(New File)'. For more serious errors, the caller should usually not call after-find-file.

If warn is non-nil, then this function issues a warning if an auto-save file exists and is more recent than the visited file.

The last thing after-find-file does is call all the functions in the list find-file-hooks.

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