Re: emacs lilypond-mode installation

[Tim McNamara]

On May 28, 2013, at 1:19 PM, Kevin Barry wrote:
> Dear LilyPond users,
> 
> A friend recently persuaded me to try emacs for text editing (LaTeX + 
> LilyPond), however I can't quite understand the instructions for installing 
> lilypond-mode, as outlined here:
> http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.16/Documentation/usage/text-editor-support
> 
> 'An Emacs mode for entering music and running LilyPond is contained in the 
> source archive in the ‘elisp’ directory. Do make install to install it to 
> elispdir.'
> 
> What exactly is the source archive?  The download seems to be a shell script. 
>  Does it mean the lilypond folder in /usr/local/?  I did find a folder called 
> elisp (actually there seem to be several on my computer since guile 2.0 comes 
> with Ubuntu) in /usr/local/lilypond/usr/share/guile/1.8/lang/elisp/ but doing 
> a make install only gave an error ('make: *** No rule to make target 
> `install'.  Stop.'). Should I be looking somewhere else?  There is an emacs 
> folder in /usr/local/lilypond/usr/share/emacs/ which seems to contain some of 
> the files mentioned in the instructions in the documentation, but I don't 
> understand them: there's no folder anywhere on my computer called elispdir, 
> and I don't know what a load-path is.  Do I just need to add a line to the 
> ~/.emacs file pointing to this folder?

I added the following to my .emacs file:

(autoload 'LilyPond-mode "lilypond-mode" "LilyPond Editing Mode" t)
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.ly$" . LilyPond-mode))
(add-hook 'LilyPond-mode-hook (lambda () (turn-on-font-lock)))

I haven't used Emacs in a long time; you might also want to add:

(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.ily$" . LilyPond-mode))

It's been a very long time since I used Emacs for anything and I can't remember 
what else I did to make LilyPond work with it.  It didn't work for me today; I 
vaguely recall moving some files into site-lisp inside the file hierarchy for 
Emacs.  And I remember it working fine; as I recall, messages from LilyPond 
were sent to the scratch buffer.

Sorry to not be more helpful.

Tim