I’m working on an extension for a proof assistant called HOL4, which uses script files written in SML, typically with the file format nameScript.sml. The stdlib SML rc’s detection hook:
hook global BufCreate .*\.(sml|fun|sig) %{
set-option buffer filetype sml
}
overrides that for HOL4. I would ideally like to keep the SML rc because the HOL4 plugin falls back onto SML highlighting for portions of code, and because HOL4 developers might still plausibly code in normal, non-HOL4-script SML. A custom patch is also not ideal, as I would like other users to just plug-and-play with this plugin without having to tamper with their kak install.
Your previous suggestion of a hook group could work here, something like a detect-sml group, which would help solve this issue and others like it without default rc and autoload tweaking. It would be helpful if added to kakoune.