emacs c++ indentation and color highlighting

Question

I am not getting indentation or colors when I open a cpp/h file with my emacs/xemacs installation on windows. Could you please advise what I need to do in my settings file to make this happen? Thanks

Answer 1

Do your files have a cpp or c extension?

Please have a look at emacs faq

Answer 2

It's the auto-mode-alist variable that stores the modes that should be invoked in relation with the file extension. This variable is configured by default to associate c++-mode to cpp files.

See the content of auto-mode-alist by doing a C-h v auto-mode-alist RET.

You could also try to define the association by yourself like this :

(setq auto-mode-alist
      (append '(("\\.\\(CC?\\|HH?\\)\\'" . c++-mode)
        ("\\.[ch]\\(pp\\|xx\\|\\+\\+\\)\\'" . c++-mode)
        ("\\.\\(cc\\|hh\\)\\'" . c++-mode)
        ) auto-mode-alist ))

Also note that .h files are by default considered C files, not C++.