I'm new to (Neo) Vim and I'm trying to find configurations that I like and learn from them.
Whenever I watch people code in vim/neovim, I notice that their cursor a thick box, same as when they're outside of Insert mode.
Basically, while in insert mode, my cursor is thin like this |, but I want to change it so that it's thick like it is when you're outside of insert mode.
I'm on the latest version of Neovim and I use Windows 10 if that's useful information.
Yes, that is possible with guicursor option, but whether what option takes effect also depends on your terminal, for example, using Windows Termianl.
This is a working setting to make cursor shape block in insert mode:
set guicursor=n-v-c-i:block
which means to make cursor shape block in normal, visual, command, and insert mode. For more details, please use :h 'guicursor'.
You should be able to change that setting with guicursor. (For NeoVim there is termcap-cursor-shape.)
But note that the two different cursor actually make sense: In normal mode you are always on a character (i.e. you can use i and a to produce different results), while in insert mode the curor must be between two characters.
Personally I think that it would just get confusing to have a blocky cursor in insert mode due to the reason above, but furthermore it would make it harder to distinguish the two modes too!
And for future reference, there is a dedicated stackexchange for vi and vim!
Related
Can anyone help me how to put an <esc> command in a vimscript in order to switch from a insert visual mode (selection mode) to the visual mode?
This is my script:
if a:type == "'<,'>"
normal! "\<esc>\<esc>"
normal gvy
let myvariable= #+
endif
explication:
I have selected a piece of text. (I'm now in insert visual mode (=selection mode))
I have to select the same text in visual mode.
Without vimscript I just have to push 2 times the <esc> command and the command gv in normal mode to reselect the selection again and this time I'm in visual mode.
I tried to put the <esc> commands as in above script but it doesn't work.
You have completely wrong syntax for invocation of :normal.
normal! "\<Esc>\<Esc>"
will execute 14 characters in normal mode, none of them will be escape character: normal does not accept expressions. You have to use
execute "normal! \e\e"
(\<Esc> also works, but \e is faster to type). I see no reason in having two normal commands here so
execute "normal! \e\egvy"
. But I am still wondering what you do to invoke this script? Without this information the above is likely to prove being completely useless.
PS: I completely agree with #romainl that using easy mode and, more, using mouse in easy mode is completely wrong way of using vim.
What are you doing in insert visual mode in the first place? Are you using GVim in "easy" mode and using the mouse? There are better ways…
Anyway, instead of <Esc><Esc> you can use <C-g> to go from select mode to visual mode.
Without more background on your goal I can't be sure but I think that you are doing something unnecessarily complicated.
Inspired by ia Writer's focus mode, I'm interested in using font + background colors in emacs to accentuate the function the cursor is in and visually cue the rest of the code as the background (I use C++, but it would be nice if this worked regardless of the programming language).
Ideally the font color of code outside the function would be dimmed (this is how focus mode works). A simpler solution probably be to change the background color slightly for the function that the cursor is currently in. How can this be done?
Nothing like this exists AFAIK. If you want it to write it yourself, here is a sketch:
Write a routine that determines the boundaries of the current function. The easiest way to do this is with (bounds-of-thing-at-point 'defun).
Write a routine that, when given the bounds of a region, gets the background face property of the region of the region, darkens it, and applies the new face to the region.
Override font-lock-fontify-region-function (see here) with a routine that calls the original value of this variable, differences the region given with the region of the current defun (using #1), and then applies routine #2 to the remaining region.
I would prefer overriding font lock to, say, using jit-lock-register because you need to control the order of fontification.
HTH!
Which-function mode is used to highlight the current function. Try it to see if it helps you, and see if this post helps you:
Emacs Setting which-function-mode
In an 80 column wide terminal emacs wraps 80 column lines, putting a backslash in the 80th column. Is there a way to tell emacs to use all 80 columns of my terminal and not wrap lines until they reach 81 characters?
If I understand this question correctly, this is not about logical line
wrapping (how lines are segmented in your file), but about visual wrapping
(how lines are displayed with respect to window width).
If you just want the display to visually wrap more than zero characters before
window boundary, and thus avoid the backslash everywhere, however long your logical lines really are, you can use longlines-mode
:
Unlike Visual Line mode, Long Lines mode breaks long lines at the fill column (see Fill Commands), rather than the right window edge. To enable Long Lines mode, type M-x longlines-mode. If the text is full of long lines, this also immediately “wraps” them all.
Then, it's only a matter of setting the fill-column appropriately, using
either global settings (.emacs, though you probably want to use a
specific mode-hook for that particular case), local settings (file
variable, dir-locals) or C-u 79 C-uC-x
f to set variable fill-column to 79. This way, lines 79
characters or higher will wrap, but before touching the right edge of the
80-char window (and thus never leaving an ugly backslash character). Your
file will be untouched.
If you simply want no visual wrapping to occur on 80-character lines, and thus do not want the 80th logical character visually displayed below the first, there are two
possible answers:
either you work in an environment where you don't necessarily wrap
logically at or before 80 characters, and you want to see the end of
those 81+ lines somewhere in your screen (i.e. you do want visual wrap, but at a number of chars above the window width), then I don't know how to do
it.
or you want to stop your lines at 80 chars logically (e.g. you
have auto-fill on and fill-column at 80), and if you do happen to have
lines 81 characters or more, you don't care about seeing their ending.
In that case, activate truncate-mode (toggle-truncate-lines).
If the issue is about the last character of your window, and what you really want is the 80th logical character of your line to be displayed on the 80th visual character of your window, though, I'm afraid I don't know how. Either you are truncating lines (as above), and the last character of your window will be a $, or you let emacs do its thing, and the last character will be a backslash.
Note when testing that auto-fill's wrapping (but also longlines-mode's, since it is its visual equivalent) will occur only at word boundaries.
One option is to set the wrapping to happen at 81, instead of 80.
M-x set-fill-column RET 81
Another option, maybe the best choice, is to define the variable overflow-newline-into-fringe as t. Try this once, manually:
M-x set-variable RET overflow-newline-into-fringe RET t
Either of these could be set by default. You can do that through M-x customize or by editing your .emacs file. Post again if you need help.
BTW, do you use emacs in a graphical or terminal environment? In a graphical environment, I often just make the window larger if I have long lines. Or I may turn on line truncation with a horizontal scrollbar.
added later
With the added information that you are running emacs in terminal mode, as you discovered, none of those options work. I tried an example running emacs in putty, where I can change the size of the window and emacs picks it right up. So, I could size to 81 columns and my 80-column lines remain intact without continuation. I am not sure which TERM value you have assigned with tmux, but you could consider creating a custom terminal type (termcap or terminfo) which supports 81 columns. I only took a brief glance at tmux but I noticed that you can resize panes within a terminal.
Now, out of curiosity, what is the primary motivator for you using tmux? I would think that the resume capability would be valuable. I would find however, that the other features are not that useful because in an X-Window environment it is cheap & easy to open more terminals or if I am using putty, I can create more of those. As far as using emacs, whether I am running under X-Window or MS-Windows, I just create as many frames as I would like and can work quite easily with that. So, is there something else that makes you interested in using tmux?
Six years after the previous answers and the workaround I still use is to use 81 character-wide windows.
Unfortunately 80-wide windows that wrap 'correctly' are not possible because of evil fringe characters. Emacs requires the last (fringe) character to have exclusive use of the final column. The argument for this is an optional fringe character is ambiguous. I dream of the day someone will submit a patch to make the fringe character optional, and perhaps solving the ambiguity with a background color.
I don't think that is prossible in general, because emacs needs at least one character to indicate that the line continues in the next line (wraps), although I'm not sure, because emacs has so many options... You could maybe instead select "Word Wrap (Visual Line Mode)" in the "Options" menu (or keyboard):
M-x visual-line-modeRET
This makes the flow more natural, without showing (at least in text modes) the indication of wrapping.
I have tried emacs on and off for a while now and every time I start emacs, I go through the same routine. Customizing. The first one is binding return to newline-and-indent. (g)Vim does this by default. Showing matching parenthesis is also done by default on (g)Vim. It is grea that I can customize emacs to my heart's content but why doesn't emacs have nice and easy defaults? For reference, I am now using Emacs 23 on a RHEL5 box.
Probably because RMS didn't want it, that and because changing long-standing defaults is just an issue of politics. Like vi, Emacs has a hard-core following and basic changes like these are minefields.
Note: if you saved your customizations, then you wouldn't have to re-do them every time...
To have those nice and easy defaults, install Emacs Starter Kit. It enables by default a bunch of useful and convenient features make even the advanced Emacs users more productive.
Otherwise, as TJ pointed out, Emacs Customization Mode (type M-x customize) allows you to save permanently any of the settings. You can even store them in a separate file from your dotemacs―(setq custom-file "~/.emacs-custom.el")―so you can use it in every computer you work on.
The title of your question doesn't really reflect what your question is (and has been answered by Trey and Torok), but I'll tell you why I like it being bound to just newline: useless whitespace. Say you are nested inside a conditional in a function etc. and hit return a couple times to leave a blank line. The blank line now has a bunch of space chars on it. Yes, you can (and I do) remove trailing whitespace before saving, but I also have visual whitespace mode on and I can see it there taunting me.
In vim, visual block can be recall by 'gv' command so that multiple commands can be applied easily. (such as, comment out, then indent, then do_something_fun).
In Emacs, how can this be achieved?
[C-xC-x] only works when current cursor position stays where previous block ended.
If previous block was changed, the closest is to go through 'point-to-register' and 'jump-to-register'.
Just I am curious if there is an Emacs built-in command making this in one shot.
If Transient Mark mode is off, the region is always active. If it's on (which it sounds like is your situation), you can set mark-even-if-inactive to non-nil to allow region commands to work while the region isn't highlighted.
However, note you also can cycle back through previous mark positions using C-u C-SPC -- this will pop the mark ring. Once you're back to where you want to be, C-x C-x will rehighlight the region you want. (It may take a little bit of playing with this feature to get a feel for it, but it's why I can't switch away from Emacs now.)
If I understand correctly what you are asking for, then you don't need to do anything. When you select a region in emacs, it stays selected until you select a new one. So you could select the region and then perform as many actions as you want.
Sounds like you're looking for the secondary selection, which stays put even as the region might change. (It stays put until you move it.)
See:
the Emacs manual, node Secondary Selection
Emacs wiki page Secondary Selection
library second-sel.el:
Also narrow-to-region (CTRL-x n n ) applies every command from then on just to that region- you can't hurt the rest of the buffer, it doesn't even show. After done editing , widen (CTRL-x n w )to get back the whole buffer.
CMM
If you use evil-mode, just press gv like in vim.
Since the answers here and for other similar SO questions didn't help for me (CUA-mode, Emacs 24, not only indent-rigidly), I continued searching and finally found a reselect-last-region defined in this collection of custom function (starting line 670). That worked like a charm for me - and hopefully does for others still arriving here.