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## 3 Skeletons as Abbrev Expansions

Rather than use a key binding for every skeleton command, you can also define an abbreviation (see (emacs)Defining Abbrevs) that will expand (see (emacs)Expanding Abbrevs) into the skeleton.

Say you want ‘`ifst`’ to be an abbreviation for the C language if statement. You will tell Emacs that ‘`ifst`’ expands to the empty string and then calls the skeleton command. In Emacs Lisp you can say something like `(define-abbrev c-mode-abbrev-table "ifst" "" 'c-if)`. Or you can edit the output from `M-x list-abbrevs` to make it look like this:

         (c-mode-abbrev-table)
         "if"           0    ""         c-if

(Some blank lines of no semantic significance, and other abbrev tables, have been omitted.)