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I have the following lines in my config file:

(fset 'yes-or-no-p 'y-or-n-p)
(setq confirm-kill-emacs ‘yes-or-no-p)

The latter line is what's throwing the error. I would like to be able to use 'y-or-n-p for some commands, like confirm-kill-emacs.

Drew
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alecvn
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    Always look closely at the error message. It's referring to a variable named `‘yes-or-no-p`. Note the quotation mark, `‘`, that is part of the variable name. – Drew Jun 29 '19 at 14:42

2 Answers2

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Put your cursor over the character ‘ on the line (setq confirm-kill-emacs ‘yes-or-no-p) and press C-x =.

Char: ‘ (8216, #o20030, #x2018, file ...) point=698 of 698 (100%) column=0

That's the left quotation mark (with C-u C-x = you can see its Unicode name: LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK). This character has no special meaning to Emacs.

You need to use the ASCII apostrophe/single-quote character instead:

(setq confirm-kill-emacs 'yes-or-no-p)

(Leaving aside why you'd use yes-or-no-p here since you've aliased it to y-or-n-p.)

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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  • I knew it was something stupid. On your aside, could you elaborate as to how would I go about setting some commands to require "yes" while having the default just requiring "y"? – alecvn Jun 29 '19 at 15:06
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    @skepticscript I don't think there's a universal recipe. Some commands have an ad hoc option (e.g. `confirm-kill-emacs`). Others hard-code the call to `yes-or-n-p` or to `y-or-n-p`. For hard-coded cases, see e.g. https://emacs.stackexchange.com/q/19077 and https://emacs.stackexchange.com/q/22569 . – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Jun 29 '19 at 15:38
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As @Gilles mentioned, once you have fset (aka aliased) the call to y-or-n-p, yes-or-no-p has been effectively overwritten. Based on the link in his comment, it seems the best way to do things is to specifically set y-or-n-p on certain prompts, and that it likely isn't possible to have y-or-n-p as a default and override certain prompts with yes-or-no-p, at least not without writing a really convoluted implementation.

alecvn
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