U.2.1 Left Margin Convention

In most major modes, Emacs assumes that any opening delimiter found at the left margin is the start of a top-level definition, or defun. Therefore, never put an opening delimiter at the left margin unless it should have that significance. For instance, never put an open-parenthesis at the left margin in a Lisp file unless it is the start of a top-level list. Never put an open-brace or other opening delimiter at the beginning of a line of C code unless it is at top level.

If you don't follow this convention, not only will you have trouble when you explicitly use the commands for motion by defuns; other features that use them will also give you trouble. This includes the indentation commands (see section U.3 Indentation for Programs) and Font Lock mode (see section J.2 Font Lock mode).

The most likely problem case is when you want an opening delimiter at the start of a line inside a string. To avoid trouble, put an escape character (`\', in C and Emacs Lisp, `/' in some other Lisp dialects) before the opening delimiter. This will not affect the contents of the string, but will prevent that opening delimiter from starting a defun. Here's an example:

(insert "Foo: \(bar) ")

In the earliest days, the original Emacs found defuns by moving upward a level of parentheses or braces until there were no more levels to go up. This always required scanning all the way back to the beginning of the buffer, even for a small function. To speed up the operation, we changed Emacs to assume that any opening delimiter at the left margin is the start of a defun. This heuristic is nearly always right, and avoids the need to scan back to the beginning of the buffer. However, it mandates following the convention described above.