Shortcut command for highlight column in emacs - emacs

There is not a single post about highlighting a square column in this community.
What are the command for that?

You can highlight the current Emacs column using any of the methods described and referenced on this Emacs-Wiki page: Highlight Current Column. This includes using library col-highlight.el or vline.el.
If you want to highlight one or more arbitrary columns (not just the current column), then try library Column Marker. Commands column-marker-1, column-marker-2, and column-marker-3 each highlight a given column (using different background colors, by default).

Related

Visual Studio Code select same position above and below not the whole line before and after (see image)

I'm using visual studio code and run into a weird problem. I'm not sure how I got here - I could have accidently pressed a shortcut unknowingly.
I'm trying to select a phrase, link or anything that crosses multiple lines (whether the lines are true lines or due to word wrap). When I select multiple lines, it doesn't automatically select the text at the start and end between the two points. Rather, it just selects the length of text for that line and repeats it in the subsequent lines. See the image below to understand.
Image of issue
As you can see, I am trying to select the words from "the" to the end of "sub". Instead of selecting all the words between the two, it selects the text "the instru" and selects every line with the same amount of characters/length.
In order to show what I am expecting, I have pasted the text into Notepad and done the same thing.
What I am expecting
As you can see, all the words between "the" and "sub" are selected.
If anyone has any idea about how to fix this, I would be greatly appreciative.
Below is a copy of the text if the images don't display.
Follow the instructions below for a click guide to retire and/or add 'School'.
Best practice if there is a change in 'School' structure would be to 'retire' any existing school setup that is no longer required and add the new sub school information. The reason why we don't just edit existing school names (typically) is due to leaving historical data intact.
Try using ctrl+shift+P and typing "Toggle Column Selection Mode"

Any way to manually trigger highlighting of semantic symbol occurrence in Visual Studio Code?

In VSCode, when you place cursor inside a symbol (variables, functions, etc), all occurrence of the same symbol will be highlighted.
This feature is somewhat useful but annoying as well. Even I can make it less obtrusive by customizing the color theme in settings.json, it will suppress the selection highlighting when you select a variable by double clicking it with mouse cursor.
I've learned that I can completely disable this feature by adding "editor.occurrencesHighlight":false in settings.json, but this feature is still useful because it can label occurrences of a symbol with different color, to represent read/write status of each occurrence.
So my question is: is there any way to disable the automatic semantic matching feature, and only enable it manually with keyboard shortcuts or commands ?
If you only need textual matches, you can select some text use the Select all occurrences of find match command. This will select every occurrence of the selected text in the current document (and also create a cursor at it)
For symbol based information, try using the Find all references or Peek references commands. The flow is different but it gives the same information.
Alternatively, use an extension like this one to create a keyboard shortcut that toggles editor.occurrencesHighlight

Org mode table, show different background on current row, or, alternate even/odd org rows

On wider tables in org mode, it is hard to see the current line.
In emacs org mode table, is there a way to display different background for the current row, or alternate background for even/odd rows?
(I am not concerned with export, although if the even/odd alternate background would export that would be great as well)
Thanks
Not that I know of, but (when editing) you can use M-x hl-line-mode to clearly see the current row highlighted.
The package stripe-buffer provides stripe-table-mode which provides odd/even row highlighting for org tables. (It also gives you stripe-listify-buffer which provides similar row highlighting for any list-style buffer like dired, ibuffer, etc.)

Highlighting lines in emacs

I am using an IM which does not support viewing previous chat history nor can I change my IM. So I have to copy the chat into a text file everytime.
I am using Emacs.Is there some way by which I can highlight the lines which contain the participant names as below?
===> **[Vivek Kumar]**
Hi, how are you doing!
===> **[Mr X Y Z]**
fine
===> **[Vivek Kumar]**
sdfksd;fks;
EDIT 1:
Earlier when I'd access to gvim, I would use the highlight.vim plugin.
Emacs supports highlighting of lines or phrases. You can use one of highlight-lines-matching-regexp, highlight-phrase, or highlight-regexp. I'm sure there are several others too.
To try this, paste your text into the editor, press ESC-x (or Alt-x might work too) to enter the "mini-buffer" at the bottom of the editor window, and enter one of the above commands.
For example, I tried:
highlight-lines-matching-regexp and entered the regexp "\[.*\]" and made it match the names in your example. Here's a screenshot:
You can tweak this expression to fit your needs. Some links to regular expressions in emacs:
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/RegularExpression
This question on SO: Good tutorial + reference for Emacs search and replace?
Of course you could also use highlight-phrase and just highlight a simple string of text (instead of messing with regexes).
Here's one where I ran highlight-phrase and entered the two separate names and gave them different colors (hi-yellow and hi-red):
Finally you can then run unhighlight-regexp to clear out the highlighting.

How can I export a comma-separated list of values from a column of an org-mode table

I have a table in org-mode with emails in one column. I want to collect all the emails as a comma-separated list, but I don't know an easy way to do it. It seems like something fairly simple, but I can't find a solution anywhere on the web.
What would be the simplest way to do it?
Dipping my toes slightly into org mode, a very simple formula of #1.. will do the trick of making a list from the values in the current column from rows 1 onwards, as it simply joins the values by commas by default. e.g.:
#+TBLFM: #5$2=#1..
(followed by C-cC-c to evaluate), would create a list in row 5, column 2, of all the values in column 2.
It does wrap the list in square brackets, but that's obviously no problem for a manual approach.
One manual approach would be to use rectangle editing commands to extract the content of that column (which should be nicely aligned by org-mode), and then just search and replace to convert to CSV format:
C-SPC at first corner
C-xrk at opposite corner
C-/ to undo the kill (there's no default copy-rectangle command)
Then in the buffer where you want the list of addresses:
C-xry to yank the rectangle
C-xC-x to exchange point and mark, marking the region
C-M-% to regex search and replace within the region, like so:
C-M-%SPC*C-qC-jRET,RET!
Does M-x org-table-export do what you want?