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## 22 Major and Minor Modes

A mode is a set of definitions that customize Emacs and can be turned on and off while you edit. There are two varieties of modes: major modes, which are mutually exclusive and used for editing particular kinds of text, and minor modes, which provide features that users can enable individually.

This chapter describes how to write both major and minor modes, how to indicate them in the mode line, and how they run hooks supplied by the user. For related topics such as keymaps and syntax tables, see Keymaps, and Syntax Tables.