@jameshowell FYI if you wrote "my-little-hook-function", you could also be interested in `define-advice', which combines a defun and a advice-add into a single form. Here are two example from my init.el:

(define-advice eval-last-sexp (:before (&rest _) eval-last-sexp-pulse)
(save-excursion
(forward-sexp -1)
(let ((start (point)))
(forward-sexp 1)
(pulse-momentary-highlight-region start (point)))))

@pkal Sorry! Let's try it this way. NEW BLOG POST: "My first advice! (in Emacs Lisp)"

https://jamesendreshowell.com/2026-04-04-my-first-advice-in-emacs-lisp.html

#emacs #emacslisp

@jameshowell You ask in the blog post why Emacs Lisp doesn't have a function to return the contents of a file as a string. It kind of makes sense to me, let's see if I can explain it.

Emacs has two data structures to store text in: strings and buffers. You may think of buffers as just for showing to the user in a window to edit, but buffers also have an extensive collection of functions to work on them programatically (obviously, since every thing the user can do to edit a buffer just calls some command). I feel like Emacs in general pushes you towards using strings only for small amounts of temporary text and buffers for longer text or longer-lived pieces of text. From that point of view it makes perfect sense to me that Emacs has a function to insert the content of a file into a buffer, but not one to return it as a string: a file is likely to long and to stick around a while for you to work on it, it belongs most likely in a buffer rather than a string. The existence of `insert-file-contents` and the non-existence of a corresponding string-returning function is meant to nudge towards buffers for file processing.

@pkal

@oantolin No, I get it, in fact slinging HTML lines around in buffers and concatenating them together in buffers makes more sense—in the Emacs context. But you can see how someone (like perhaps the author of org-static-blog, and certainly naive me) would cling to string-oriented habits.

Thank you for the thoughtful, patient, illuminating answer to my snarky rhetorical question!

@pkal

@oantolin The "s" package has a function to do that, and the consequence is that people keep on reading an entire function in as a string and then doing GC-heavy list processing on the function, where using a buffer would have been more idiomatic.

I am not sure if I submitted a patch for this once, but a compromise of having a `slurp` macro could be interesting, since it would read in the file once at macroexpansion time, without making it a general replacement for buffers.

@jameshowell

@minad @oantolin @jameshowell I don't want to stop you from suggesting it on the proper channels, but it is my experience that a `read-file` function is almost always abused, especially by people with a background in functional programming with lazy evaluation. So for me this is not a theoretical concern, but practical experience that makes me skeptical.

And in general: Something being common is a bad sign that it is the right thing to do, let alone should be encouraged.