I am learning artist-mode in emacs and finding it pretty interesting.
I want to create shapes and write text inside them as we can do with other software where one can draw shapes.
However, when I type some characters inside a rectangle, the shape gets distorted. The vertical line gets shifted by some characters.
Please see attached image.
Is there something I can do to fix it? Or is it a bug in artist-mode. I watched some screencasts and videos and did not remember anyone mentioning anything about this odd behavior.
I am on Mac and my emacs version is
GNU Emacs 25.1.1 (x86_64-apple-darwin16.0.0, NS appkit-1504.00 Version 10.12 (Build 16A323))
Try this before you type text into a rectangle.
C-x h (Select the whole buffer.)
M-x untabify <RET>
This will make you buffer tab free, which should solve the problem when you are typing.
Note that you should avoid using backspace for deleting text. Move your cursor and overwrite them instead.
There is a workaround I found for this cases.
select text mode
add the relevant text, RET
type term RET (here we specify the font)
RET (No ARGS for figlet, might also depend upon use-cases)
It may be a bit clumsy, but I usually do
select text mode
press Insert (Ovwrt)
add text
enter artist mode
I'm surprised not to see overwrite-mode. This replaces text at point rather than inserting it.
People have mentioned untabify to change tabs to spaces. Use whitespace-mode to see where those tabs (and spaces) are.
Related
I have a text that I already typed in a text editor, but when I open it in Emacs, so I can keep working o Emacs (Org-Mode), it appears it is not wrapping the lines propperly. The paragraph (or what it is supposed to be a paragraph) appears in a single line, instead of having a line break when reaching the screen limit.
Do you guys know how to reformat these line breaks?
Emacs has a built-in variable called word-wrap, which has a default value of nil. When word-wrap is nil, long lines are wrapped indiscriminately at the window-edge without consideration as to whether a whole word is visually broken up -- i.e., part of a word may be at the end of the visually wrapped line and part of the word may be at the beginning of the subsequent visually wrapped line.
The most common method of enabling word-wrap is to use the built-in visual-line-mode: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Visual-Line-Mode.html Visual line mode includes a few other goodies, like remapping certain keyboard shortcuts and pretty bitmap images in the fringes if they are visible in the window. Enabling visual-line-mode can be accomplished a number of ways -- one example is manually: M-x visual-line-mode
I'm a beginner with emacs. Altough I'm finding it amusing and challenging, I still don't know some basic things, like, when I open a text or a piece of script wrote in another editors, emacs don't show the text formatted properly (missing all tabs, all text left-aligned) and vice-versa.
Also, when I copy a link with emacs with M-w, my clipboard is still empty and I can't paste it in a browser. I already did my "homework". I've read the tutorial and I'm almost finishing the manual and didn't see anything to address that.
tnx in advance.
Some editors, like Intellij IDEA for example, will indent code based on how they understand it and not based on how it was actually indented, there's no Emacs mode that operates in the same way, not to my best knowledge. If you were using something like Eclipse or MS Visual Studio before - then you probably just have a different size of tab character (this is why some programmers insist on indenting code with spaces rather than tabs). But the width of the tab character is adjustable. In order to customize it you would:
add in your initialization file (usually .emacs file in your $HOME directory, you can create one, if it is not there yet):
;; makes tab character as wide as four space characters
(setq default-tab-width 4)
though some other major editing modes override this variable, you would need to tell what language you are dealing with to get better instructions.
Clipboard, see this answer: How to copy text from Emacs to another application on Linux if you are on Linux, then likely you need to set x-select-enable-clipboard to t.
Aligning text to the right (or left for LTR languages) is not possible in Emacs, as far as I understand. You could align block of text, if you split it into lines and align on the line ends, but that would mean aligning by adding spaces at the beginning - something you don't really want to do.
Tabs should work (you might need to fix the width). Use mouse to select to the clipboard, or use CtrlInsert to copy and ShiftDelete to cut.
Assuming emacs has picked the right mode for the file - it usually does - you can press C-x h to select all, then TAB to indent all selected lines. What other editors are you using, and what platform(s)?
As for the clipboard issue, some builds of emacs work correctly with the native clipboard, some don't. You might want to investigate CUA mode.
Any time I try to move around in the buffer (besides moving up and down lines with C-p and C-n), my cursor is brought back to the command line so I cannot select and copy arbitrary text in the multi-term buffer. I can use my mouse to move to and highlight text, and all goes well from there, but is there a set of key bindings that will allow me to set the mark in other parts of the buffer? I looked in multi-term.el` but was not able to find anything that addressed this.
Try 'term-line-mode' and 'term-char-mode'
I decided that I was ready to try something new, after a few years of using gEdit for most of my coding needs, and try to learn using Emacs. I knew this would be difficult, as I have heard how complex Emacs can be, but I was lured by its power. The hardest thing has been getting used to writing ELisp in the .emacs file to change things about the editor. I can't currently do it myself, but I have found a few helpful snippets here and there to change some options.
One thing I have been having a lot of problems with is getting Emacs to remember the text I have selected after a command. For instance, I commonly highlight a section of code to mass indent it. However, if I do this in Emacs, it will move the selected text only once before unselecting all of the text. Does anyone know a way around this?
Anyway, I apologize for what seems to me to be an easy question, but after an hour of Google searching and looking around here on SO, I thought it was worth asking. I have a few more questions about Emacs, but I will save them and ask separately after I get this straightened out. Thanks!
UPDATE
A few people have asked about what mod I am using and what type of text I am entering. While I don't know much about Emacs modes, I am editing a pure text file at the moment. Something like this:
Hello, I am a simple text file
that is made up of three separate
lines.
If I highlight all three lines and hit TAB, I get this:
Hello, I am a simple text file
that is made up of three separate
lines.
This is great, however, if I use C-x C-x like some suggest below to reselect the text and hit TAB again, I get this:
Hello, I am a simple text file
that is made up of three separate
lines.
I hope this helps!
FWIW, here is the reason for the behaviour of your newly-added example. (I'm not 'solving' the issue here, but I'm posting it to demystify what you're seeing.)
This was determined with emacs -q which disables my customisations, so the following is default behaviour for emacs 23.2.
You are in text-mode. You should see (Text) or similar in the mode line at the bottom of the screen, and C-h m will tell you (under the list of minor modes) "Text mode: Major mode for editing text written for humans to read." Emacs decides (by way of the auto-mode-alist variable) that it should switch to text-mode if you visit a filename matching certain extensions (such as .txt).
In text-mode pressing TAB with a region highlighted causes indent-according-to-mode to be called on each line of the region in sequence. The slightly convoluted path to finding this out starts at C-h k TAB, which tells us that TAB is bound to indent-for-tab-command, which in this instance calls indent-region -- that function name is not stated explicitly in the help, but can be seen in the code -- which checks the buffer-local indent-region-function variable, which is nil, and: "A value of nil means really run indent-according-to-mode on each line."
indent-according-to-mode checks the indent-line-function variable, which has the buffer-local value indent-relative.
Use C-h f indent-relative RET to see the help for this function. (Read this).
Although you probably won't yet have had the experience to know how to check all that (or necessarily even want to!), and fully understand everything it tells you, this is an example of how the self-documenting aspect of Emacs enables a user to figure out what is going on (which then makes it feasible to change things). I essentially just used C-h k (describe-key), C-h f (describe-function), and C-h v (describe-variable) to follow the documentation. Looking at the source code for indent-for-tab-command was as simple as clicking the file name shown as part of its help page.
I suggest doing the following to help see what is happening when indent-relative runs on each line:
M-x set-variable x-stretch-cursor t
M-x set-variable ruler-mode-show-tab-stops t
M-x ruler-mode
Now for each line in turn, put the cursor at the very start of the line and press TAB. You'll end up with all three lines indented to the first tab-stop ('T' in the ruler).
Now repeat this -- again, ensure you are at the very start of each line, in front of the existing indentation.
The first character of the first line (which is currently a tab) is once again indented to the first tab-stop, as there is no preceding line for it to examine.
Next, the first character of the second line is indented to match the position of the first non-white-space character of the preceding line. Because the first character of the second line is also a tab, the actual text of the second line is pushed one tab further along.
The third line follows suit. Its first tab character is lined up with the first non-white-space character of the second line, with the same relative effect as before, giving you the final state in your example.
To emphasise, note what happens if you now put enter the line "a b c" above the existing lines, then move back to the start of the next line (what was previously the first line) and press TAB. The first tab character will now be indented in line with the 'b'. Provided that the indent-tabs-mode variable is true (meaning you have actual tab characters), then this will have no practical effect on the position of the words in the line, as 'indenting' a tab with spaces will not have an effect until the number of spaces exceeds the width of the tab (but that's another kettle of fish entirely!)
All this really means is that text-mode in Emacs doesn't behave the way you'd like it to in this situation. Other major modes can do completely different things when you press TAB, of course.
As is invariably the case with Emacs, things you don't like can be changed or circumvented with elisp. Some searching (especially at the Emacs Wiki) will frequently turn up useful solutions to problems you encounter.
Try typing C-x C-x after Emacs unselects it.
Then, instead of hitting tab (I never knew that tab does what you said! That's totally whacked.), do M-8 C-x C-i. Pity it's so many keys, but it ought to do what you want -- namely, shove everything over 8 columns. Obviously replace the M-8 with something else if you want some other number of columns.
What I usually do is simply type C-x C-x (exchange-point-and-mark) after a command that deactives the region.
How are you indenting, and in which mode?
The indentation rules in any programming mode should generally just get it right. (If they don't, that's probably more indicative that you want to configure the rules for that mode differently, but I suspect that's a different question which has been asked already).
If you're in text-mode or similar and just using TAB, then I can see the problem.
Note that if you're using indent-rigidly (C-x C-i, or C-x TAB which is the same thing) then you can repeatedly indent the same region simply by repeating the command, even if the highlighting has disappeared from view.
You can also use a prefix arg to indent-rigidly to make it indent many times. e.g. C-u C-u C-x C-i (easier to type than it looks) will indent 16 spaces (4 x 4, as the prefix arg defaults to 4, and it multiplies on each repeat). Similarly, M-8 C-x C-i indents 8 spaces. This is fine in some circumstances, and way too cumbersome in others.
Personally I suggest putting (cua-selection-mode 1) into your .emacs and using that for rigid indentation. Trey Jackson made a handy blog about it. With this, you can C-RET to start rectangle selection, down as many lines as you need, TAB repeatedly to indent the lines, and C-RET to exit the mode.
While the rectangle is active, RET cycles through the corners. For left-hand corners, typing inserts in front. For right-hand corners, typing inserts after. For the single-column rectangle, bottom counts as 'left' and top counts as 'right' for this purpose.
Trey's blog lists all the available features (or look in the source file: cua-base.el)
Be warned that indentation in Emacs is generally an unexpectedly complicated topic.
You can do this with something like the following:
(add-hook 'text-mode-hook (lambda ()
(set (make-local-variable 'indent-region-function)
(lambda (s e)
(indent-rigidly s e tab-width)))))
Then selecting a region and hitting TAB. will indent the region by a tab-width. You can then exchange point and mark with C-x C-x and hit TAB again to repeat.
I do, however, agree with the previous answers that suggest using indent-rigidly directly.
When editing an Rnw file in Emacs, I often want to make the region cover a chunk of text that contains an R chunk. For a simple example:
ewr
<<>>=
#
wer
I use transient-mark-mode such that the region is highlighted. But, if I put the point on the first line and hit C-SPC, then use C-n to move the point down, the highlighting disappears when I try to advance the point past the <<. The region I want is still selected, but highlighting seems to fail when crossing the <<. How can I fix this?
Thanks and best regards
I find that your problem shows up when I do what you describe, but it goes away if you scroll down using C-down or C-M-n instead. I think you can even use C-down to get past the R chunk and then C-n to step past lines afterward.
I had the same problem and the solution suggested by fojtasek did not work for me because I had an additional configuration problem. I hope that this might be useful for you and other users. Make sure that if you are using ESS and Auctex that you have fully loaded Auctex. To be more specific, it turned out that when I had previously installed auctex 11.86, I did not correctly load the package. Because I am a novice emacs user, I only managed to load the first of the following two lines:
(load "auctex.el" nil t t)
(load "preview-latex.el" nil t t)
If you have not added the second line, you will only have an Auctex menu but NOT a preview-latex menu.
Thanks to Fojtasek for the C advice. I find C- with the arrow key will keep a contiguous highlight. C-down brings up a page that says "this confusing feature has been disabled by default".
In my opinion, this behavior that OP complained about is a flaw in Auctex, and the fact that Fojtasek has a way to avoid it is helpful, but still it is just a workaround. I don't want Auctex to to this and I don't really want to have to use my left hand for holding down C while scrolling. PITA.
If Auctex needs some special selection tool, they should have to use unusual keystrokes for that. Why impose it on the rest of us who just want to highlight big sections and move them around, whether or not they have <<>> in them.