In a follow-up question to my previous question, is it possible to inhibit font-locking for a specific region in a buffer? I've looked through the special text properties portion of the manual, but couldn't find any properties that appeared to disable fontification. Is there another mechanism?
As an example, could font-lock be disabled for just the first line or two of a buffer?
There's no specific support for that, no.
You can try to abuse the font-lock-extend-region-functions, but you'll need to be extra careful to try and avoid inf-loops where one font-lock-extend-region-function tries to extend the region and you shrink it back ad-nauseam.
Is there any way to globally configure all text editors in Eclipse to insert only the user's actual keystrokes into the file, and zero additional characters?
In particular, is there a way to ensure that typing ENTER always inserts exactly ENTER, no more, no less, and never inserts ENTER SPACE SPACE...SPACE for some context-dependent number of spaces?
The behavior will have several desirable (to me) consequences:
typing ENTER BACKSPACE would restore the file to its exact state prior to ENTER. Currently, roundtripping the state (e.g. to revert an accidental keypress) requires ENTER BACKSPACE BACKSPACE BACKSPACE ... BACKSPACE.
typing ENTER ENTER ENTER ENTER at any location in the file would produce three completely empty lines and leave the cursor at the extreme left of the fourth line, versus four lines prefixed by SPACE SPACE...SPACE which demand further cleanup.
Multi-line copy-paste will be 100% predictable and consistent irrespective of context.
This is how every other basic editor behaves (or at least can behave), so it seems plausible that this would be achievable in Eclipse, somehow. But although I have found ways to disable every other 'smart' intervention Eclipse throws across my path, I have never found a way to disable the ENTER SPACE SPACE...SPACE behavior.
The solution needn't be a built-in configuration parameter (and by this point I doubt such exists). Plugins or other one-time hacks of moderate complexity are acceptable, provided the result is an always-on type-one-key-get-one-character behavior.
Note, importantly, that invoking an auto-format operation after the fact to clean up unwanted whitespace is a non-solution. I know that works; it's not what I'm looking for.
I remember having read something about extensions to AUCTeX which allow to move up or down chapters, sections, etc. ... even list items. Or to promote them / demote them in a way similar to what Org-mode is capable of.
Though, I can't find any information about that anymore. Did I dream?
You can use outline-minor-mode which then gives you outline-demote and outline-promote.
There is the outline-magic mode which extends the outline-minor mode so you can use it with auctex to move up/down or promote/demote chapters, sections,..., but not list items (to my knowledge!)
https://github.com/tj64/outline-magic.git
I'm tinkering about switching my IDE to emacs. (I'm still an emacs newbie.)
The problem is that I customized my IDE quite well and I'd regret to leave my helpers behind.
Let me explain:
Shows the current open files/buffers, allows fast switching with a hotkey (C-1, C-2, ...)
Shows the most recent texts on the "clipboard" or inserted by complete (no. 4), text insertable with a hotkey (C-b 1, C-b 2, ...) Last inserted shown in bold, insertable with C-`
The last inserted complete (no. 4) text, insertable with M-`
Autocomplete-ish list, gathered from all open files, regardless of their type with some magical logic. text insertable with a hotkey (M-1, M-2, ...)
I guess emacs has such features, but I'm a visual type I'd like to see what I have available.
Of course actual hotkeys don't matter much, but as you see having all that info visible makes it easy to hit the spot with the least keypresses.
My pain is that there is a plethora of emacs extensions providing various features, checking all seems to take a lifetime.
My question is:
are there any emacs extensions to achieve similar looks and behavour?
as I'm a programmer, which extensions could I take as a base to assemble something like this?
Thanks!
Elaborating a bit more:
I’m a python dev, so most of the code I’m writing is python. Add some HTML JS CSS XML to the picture.
One important thing is that completion needs to work across filetype boundaries, because python / HTML(template) / XML(config) / doctest identifiers are cross-referenced. It’s a huge pain with some IDEs that completion works only for python filetypes.
I have a lot of same named files but in different folders, like init.py, configure.zcml, etc. It seems to be a pain to switch between those by filename.
Better said that’s a list of recently inserted text. To be reused by the fewest keys as possible. Usually when coding I’m reusing the same identifiers/whatever within the same task. So it’s handy to have them listed instead having to retype the starting x chars to get completion again.
Usually best use of this feature is when changing/refactoring code. Like adding one more extra feature and the identifier is needed several times over the place.
TL;DR
Learn keyboard macros. Learn yasnippet.
Autocomplete mode is probably similar to what you have.
Get acquainted with emacs kill-ring before trying to change it, it wants to be your friend. Then you'll know what to look for when you DO want to change it.
Long Version
Shows the current open files/buffers, allows fast switching with a hotkey (C-1, C-2, ...)
You have three options for this.
My personal preference is to have all source files open at all times. So I don't need a visual list of open buffers. Whenever I want to switch to a file I hit C-= (which I've bound to iswitchb-buffer) and type a couple of unique letters. It's common to constantly switch between the same two buffers so I also bound C-backspace to previous-buffer.
Another option I can recommend is tabbar. It's not exactly like your setup, but it displays a list of open buffers (just like webpages in a browser) and it has functions for cycling through the tabs, so it shouldn't be hard to reproduce your C-number key bindings.
You could use speedbar or ecb. They would be the most similar to your current visual configuration, but I'd argue the other options are more efficient.
Shows the most recent texts on the "clipboard" or inserted by complete (no. 4), text insertable with a hotkey (C-b 1, C-b 2, ...) Last inserted shown in bold, insertable with...
I see you've sort of mixed the clipboard with completion history. When it comes to emacs, yasnippet and autocomplete are just so good you're better off going with them for completion (see below).
Emacs clipboard is called the kill-ring. I'm sure you know of C-y and M-y, so you can always recover anything you've cut in the past. Unfortunately, I don't know of any packages that constantly display the kill ring or allow you to yank a specific part of it (though that shouldn't be too hard to write), but at least you know what to search for (kill-ring).
The last inserted complete (no. 4) text, insertable with M-`
I'll be honest, I don't see that much use in this. If you have to repetitively insert text, you should learn keyboard macros. In fact, you should learn keyboard macros anyway, they're the first reason I got hooked to emacs.
Autocomplete-ish list, gathered from all open files, regardless of their type with some magical logic. text insertable with a hotkey (M-1, M-2, ...)
Emacs had many great completion options. In your case, the best one is probably autocomplete-mode. It pops-up completion options (much like your separate completions window), and I think it allows for quick selection of a specific option (like your M-number shortcuts). Also it has several different ways of deciding which completions to offer you (it calls them "sources") and one of them is to gather from all buffers.
In addition to that you have yasnippet, and I couldn't possibly recommend it enough. Seriously. Learning to use it and writing your own snippets will change the way you write code. You'll become a mage whose fingers produce pages of code flowing through your screen in blazing speeds. Use yasnippet!
Once you have it configured, every 3 or 4 keys you press will generate a line (or more) of code for you.
After all that, if you still miss something from your previous editor you'll write it yourself. :-)
Your setup looks exactly like https://github.com/emacsmirror/ecb.
To me at least, since I don't use side-bars:)
You should take a look at the extension speedbar. I have installed this extension, but I rarely use it even for a very large project.
I'd like to be able to open two windows in Emacs, select a region of text in each window, and get a comparison of the difference between the two selections.
This would be very handy for a large-scale maintenance project, where I'm working on a version tree with multiple branches, lots of copy/paste, and code that is being moved around sporadically.
I've found a paid-for tool that does provide this function (Ultracompare), but it's windows-specific, and I need a solution that runs on Solaris/Linux.
I think M-x ediff-regions-wordwise does what you want.
Run ediff-regions-wordwise and Emacs will prompt for each buffer, then prompt you to select (or confirm) a region in the buffer.
And, bonus, Emacs runs on Windows too!
I'd be inclined to use narrow-to-region (C-x n n) in both buffers followed by M-x compare-windows if only because it has worked for me for at least 100 years. :-)