I have been trying to solve a sh-mode indentation issue in Emacs (I get a double indent after a then) and found that I can set the indentation by hand and then run C-c > to automatically configure the indentation.
However, this configuration only applies to my current session and I can't seem to find any variables that have been modified as a result of the auto-configuration. (It worked though: the indentation is consistently what I want.) When it has run, it says "Local rules set" but doesn't tell me what local rules have been set.
And of course, when I restart Emacs, the local configuration is lost and I have to run the auto-config command again.
I've found a number of questions on this site about listing variables and their values, but I can't find out how to list ones that have only been changed for the current session. I even used this post to dump variables before and after running the C-c > command and comparing the output; nothing obviously different.
So I suppose my question is twofold:
If session variables are what's meant by "local rules" then how do I find out which ones were set?
If "local rules" means something else, then what is that and how can I somehow transfer those changes to my ~/.emacs file?
I think the result depends on your version of Emacs, but with a recent version, this is handled by SMIE, so the personal settings are kept in the smie-config variable.
The local settings in use in the current buffer are kept in an internal variable (smie-config--buffer-local). You can move them over to smie-config and save them into your ~/.emacs by calling smie-config-save.
One more detail: smie-config-save doesn't in itself save the settings to ~/.emacs. It only transfers them from the transient buffer-local variable smie-config--buffer-local to the global smie-config variable which is under the control of Customize and can have be saved to your ~/.emacs via something like M-x customize-save-customized. This should arguably be improved in smie-config-save. I suggest M-x report-emacs-bug to ask for this improvement.
This is more of an incomplete workaround than an answer, but it's a start!
The idea is to trigger sh-learn-buffer-indent as soon as a shell script is loaded. Add the following to your ~/.emacs file:
(add-hook 'sh-set-shell-hook 'sh-learn-buffer-indent)
A couple of important notes:
It assumes that your shell script is already correctly formatted when it's loaded.
It can be slow for large files.
(This is apparently mentioned in sh-script.el and was brought to my attention by Noam Postavsky via the bug report I filed.)
Related
Each time when I edit bash script I type a command M-x shell-script-mode. And then I get nice shell code higlighting. How to get it automatically each time I start emacs so I do not have to type the command. When I added (shell-script-mode) to init.el it did not help.
You can set the default major mode to be whatever you want by adding
(setq-default major-mode 'shell-script-mode)
to your init file. That will ensure that any newly created buffer will be in shell-script-mode unless its mode is specified otherwise (e.g. through auto-mode-alist). Whether it's a good idea or not, I don't know: I probably would not want that to be my default setting - but to each her/his own.
One of the simplest ways to have Emacs set the desired mode for a buffer editing a file is to include a special comment in the first line of that file, e.g. for a shell script your first line might be:
# -*-sh-*-
For scripts it is also common, or and often even required, to have an interpreter file comment on the very first line of the file, which of course would preclude having an Emacs mode comment, so Emacs also looks for interpreter file comments and associates those with a major mode, so the first line of your shell script might be:
#!/bin/sh
There are a number of other ways to tell Emacs how to set the buffer mode when visiting a file. See, for example, Emacs Manual: Choosing File Modes
I'm running my own emacs config that resides in non-default place. So I use -Q -l startup options. I've defined place for saving customization and set custom-file variable accordingly.
Unfortunately emacs refuses to save my custom options motivating it with possible harm to original options. But I know what I do, and I what to have separate custom file filled with current session variables?
How can I overcome emacs restrictions?
emacs manual says:
If Emacs was invoked with the -q or --no-init-file options (see Initial Options), it will not let you save your customizations in your initialization file. This is because saving customizations from such a session would wipe out all the other customizations you might have on your initialization file.
Don't use -Q. That implies -q, and I trust that if your config resides elsewhere, you do not also have any of the default init filenames for Emacs to find and use.
Instead, use the combination of options that you actually need. Refer to:
C-hig (emacs) Initial Options RET
`-Q'
`--quick'
Start emacs with minimum customizations. This is similar to using
`-q', `--no-site-file', `--no-site-lisp', and `--no-splash'
together. This also stops Emacs from processing X resources by
setting `inhibit-x-resources' to `t' (*note Resources::).
Edit:
I'm really not sure I understand why you need to retain your default init files when you claim that you don't want to use them. It would help if you clarified why --no-init-file is critical? Are you trying to provide a secondary configuration of Emacs which does not conflict with how people usually run it?
You might work around it by setting the HOME environment variable in your start-up script.
See C-hig (emacs) Find Init RET
Also see the init-file-user variable and, for the gory details, the command-line function.
(Perhaps setting the likes of init-file-user, user-init-file, & custom-file with --eval might work.)
With Emacs, if the current buffer is one that's "visiting" a normal file (for example), whose full pathname is /path/to/somefile, and one runs find-file (C-x C-f), the prompt that appears in the mini-buffer is something like
Find file: /path/to/▮
...with the cursor placed as indicated above by ▮. IOW, the suggested path shown by default is always to the directory containing the file that the current buffer is visiting.
If, however, the current buffer is an Emacs shell process, and one runs find-file, then, AFAICT, the path shown in the prompt remains fixed at the value of $PWD when the shell process was started, irrespective of the current value of $PWD:
Find file: /pwd/at/startup/▮
This behavior is not so useful, because the $PWD at startup often becomes irrelevant later on. It would be really nice if the directory shown in find-file's prompt were instead the shell process's current $PWD.
Is there a simple way to modify find-file to behave this way whenever the current buffer is a shell process?
You want "shell directory tracking". E.g. check dirtrack-mode or shell-dirtrack-mode.
shell-dirtrack-mode tries to parse "cd" commands, (event_jr: which in my experience does not work consistently). dirtrack-mode uses the prompt regexp, which works very well.
There are a number of ways to manage this. As Stefan notes, there are a couple of built in packages that manage it.
My preferred way is to alter your prompt (when in Emacs) to have the $PWD embedded in it, and then Emacs strips it out and uses it. This has the benefit of always being up to date. I've found that dirtrack-mode sometimes gets out of sync.
Check out my solution here, which is a modification of a similar implementation on the Emacs Wiki.
One of my colleagues uses TextPad, and one feature I found really useful is the Auto-Reload. (The feature has been described in this SO quesion: Alternative to TextPad's Prompt to Reload File). Basically, it keeps reloading the file without any prompt from the user, which is really helpful when monitoring log files that are updated in real-time. Is there something similar available for Emacs? If not, can anyone whip up the required elisp magic?
M-x auto-revert-mode
I should add that for log tails, there is the more specific auto-revert-tail-mode, and that if you like it as a general feature (my case), you can turn on global-auto-revert-mode, to revert all buffers. Beware of remote files in that case.
If you want auto-revert to apply everywhere you can also use global-auto-revert-mode. Add
(global-auto-revert-mode 1)
to your .emacs
Here's my preference, FWIW: I do not use auto-revert. Instead, I bind f5 to this command:
(defun revert-buffer-no-confirm ()
"Revert buffer without confirmation."
(interactive) (revert-buffer t t))
Sounds silly, but that simple change makes all of the difference. This is what f5 does anyway on MS Windows, so it's a habit that works in all applications (on Windows).
Note that I do not change (e.g. remap) any bindings for revert-buffer. I use this only when I explicitly want to revert without confirming (which is quite often, in practice).
HTH.
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.