yasnippet how to debug? - emacs

I'm using some snippet I found from the internet.
And I encounter lots of error when using them.
for example,
printf ("${1:%s}\\n"${1:$(if (string-match "%" text) "," "\);")
}$2${1:$(if (string-match "%" text) "\);" "")}
This is a printf snippet for c mode.
But it always gave me [yas] elisp error! Symbol's value as variable is void: text
So is there any bug in this piece of code or bug at somewhere else?
If so, how can I debug it?

It seems that the snippet you are using was written for older versions of yasnippet because the variable text was renamed to yas-text in newer versions, try replacing text with yas-text in the snippet.
I case you are not aware you can use yas/tryout-snippet to quickly try out snippets while editing them.

Related

New to Emacs. When I type ", \" is automatically inserted

As the title states, I'm relatively new to Emacs. I tried out several starter kits but went with Prelude and changed a lot of things around.
Anyway, I've been getting a good handle on everything...until this morning I was working and I typed double-quotes. Normally Emacs would insert a second double quotes right after ("") due to the auto-completion, but I must have accidentally changed something with a keystroke and now when I type ", I get \"\".
Thoughts?
Thank you.
This seems to be an issue with smartparens which prelude installs by default (see the file prelude-programming.el. This behavior is described in detail on smartparens wiki. To ensure that smartparens is causing problems you can can do C-h k" this would print about the command acutally run when " is pressed, if the command is sp--self-insert-command then the following should work
Paste this (setq sp-autoescape-string-quote nil) to your *scratch* buffer, go to the closing parenthesis and do C-xC-e, this will disable the behavior for current emacs session.
To disable the behavior for all future emacs session, assuming that you are using prelude, you will need to add the following to your personal config (basically some file inside /path/to/prelude/personal/).
(setq sp-autoescape-string-quote nil)
This will disable the auto-escaping of the string quotes, completely. If you like this behavior and do not want to disable it completely you can do what #steckerhalter suggests C-q" will insert just one parenthesis.
If the above does not solve the issue then try providing following info in your question which may help us debug the issue,
1) The list minor modes active (this can be obtained by doing C-hm).
2) Output of C-hk"
Hope that helps
this sounds a lot like smartparens (https://github.com/Fuco1/smartparens) which is included in Prelude. usually when you are inside "" then it will escape the quotes:
"hahah \"\" bah"
if you want to get a normal " inside quotes you have to use C-q " or disable smartparens with M-x smartparens-mode
If, as you say in a comment, " is bound to self-insert-command, then when you type " what happens is that a (single, unescaped) " character is inserted.
However, I suspect you have some mode turned on that does something additional whenever a " char is inserted. You mention automatic insertion of a second ", for example. That kind of behavior comes from a mode such as is provided by library smart-parens or electric-pair.
And you mention Prelude.
To find out what part of your init file (~/.emacs) is causing the behavior you see, bisect your init file recursively (first comment-out half, to see which half is responsible, then 3/4, to see which quarter is responsible,...). Then, if you still have a question about the responsible code, ask here, providing that info.
When you describe your problem here, it is important to be specific: what Emacs version, what mode(s), what libraries have you loaded,... Whatever might be pertinent. But first narrow down the problem by bisecting your init file to find the culprit.

emacs and dictionary.el

I installed emacs 24.1 and dictionary.el, which is a dictd client plugin for emacs. I am able to look up dictionary within command "dict xxx", it works just fine.
However, dictionary.el doesn't work correctly, whenever I use "M-x dictionary-search" to find something, minibuffer displays "dictionary-mode: Symbol's function definition is void: make-local-hook".
Here is what I have in dot-emacs:
(setq dictionary-server "localhost")
Any ideas?
If you're referring to http://me.in-berlin.de/~myrkr/dictionary/
Then the issue would be here:
(make-local-hook 'kill-buffer-hook)
(add-hook 'kill-buffer-hook 'dictionary-close t t)
Because the add-hook call supplies the local argument, you can resolve this issue by deleting (or commenting out) the first line with the call to make-local-hook. That line was only left in the code to provide backward-compatibility with very old versions of Emacs, and is otherwise redundant.
Make sure you send them a bug report.
Edit: tripleee has pointed out that this problem has already been fixed in the current version of the library, which now lives at the following URL:
https://github.com/myrkr/dictionary-el
"localhost" is defined in /etc/dictd/dict.conf. It should be OK to remove or comment out the setq. By default, dictionary-el points to dict.org.

Emacs lisp highlighting

I have wrote simple macro to define interactive function and bind it to key at same time
(That what my previous question related)
The only thing, that annoy me, that it looks ugly without highlighting.
It called such way:
(define-and-bind-command foo "C-x £" (message "Hello world"))
I want define-and-bind-command and foo be highlighted.
Well, to get define-and-bind-command highlighted, I can use wrapper around defmacro,
altho is not so pretty, and I have no idea about foo.
I know it is possible, because argument of require is highlighted with const face.
Or, probably, I am inventing wheel, and there is an another lisp mode with more
advanced highlighting?
highlighting the 'define-and-bind-command' can be achieved very easily using 'font-lock-add-keywords', usage would be
(defun my-elisp-mode-keywords()
(font-lock-add-keywords nil
'(
("\\<\\(define-and-bind-command\\)" . 'font-lock-keyword-face)
)
)
)
Of course you could change the 'font-lock-keyword-face' to any face of your liking or create and use your own face. You can find the name for a face already used very easy by moving the point (cursor) over the font-locked part of text and entering 'describe-face' followed by a return.
Edit2: Oh and of course you need to hook that defun to some hook, for elisp mode that would be:
(add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode-hook 'my-elisp-mode-keywords)
Highlighting the foo part can be done using a regexp.
Unfortunately I can not yet help you with that part because I'm not sure how to match a regexp containing the 'define-and-bind-command' but highlighting only the word after.
Edit: unless you want to highlight both the 'define-and-bind-command' and the foo part in the same face, then it should be very easy. But I guess you want them to have different faces?
Edit3: Corrected my code, stackoverflow ate some braces before...
Edit4: Okay, I have a solution for matching the second part only, I have not tested it extensively but it seems to work. I have allowed for foo to contains any character but a space (and newline I think), I guess one could restrict that event futher to a-zA-z0-9 and "-", so feel free to change that to your liking. The Code responsible for matching only the foo part is
("\\bdefine-and-bind-command\s\\([^\s]*\\)" 1 'font-lock-function-name-face t)
Insert that in the line after the other font-lock keyword in the above function and you're good to go. The regexp matches 'define-and-bind-command' which must begin a word (that's the \b for) followed by a space and then it returns (font-locks) everything followed until a space exists.
Hope this helps!
font-lock-add-keywords can take a symbol, the mode to which to apply the new keywords. So you could do
(font-lock-add-keywords
'emacs-lisp-mode
'(("\\<\\(define-and-bind-command\\)" . 'font-lock-keyword-face)))
The disadvantage compared to using a function and a hook is that this doesn't work for derived modes; that is, if you have a mode which is derived from emacs-lisp-mode, it will not inherit these keywords.

emacs + latex + yasnippet: Why are newlines inserted after a snippet?

Everytime I insert a snippet (with yasnippet) in a .tex document, I obtain a newline after the snippet. This is quite annoying for small snippets that are typically used in text style. How can I avoid that?
I read a bit about the problem (http://code.google.com/p/yasnippet/issues/detail?id=115 or http://yasnippet.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/faq.html) but couldn't find a solution. Reproduce it as follows (I work with Aquamacs 2.3a on Mac OS X 10.6.8 with yasnippet version 0.6.1c):
Define ~/Library/Preferences/Aquamacs Emacs/Preferences.el to be:
(require 'yasnippet)
(yas/initialize)
(yas/load-directory "~/Library/Preferences/Aquamacs Emacs/plugins/yasnippet-0.6.1c/snippets")
define the following snippet (call it "bm.yasnippet" [bm = boldmath]; the star * symbolizes where the cursor ends -- note that there is no newline after the snippet)
# name: \bm{}{}
# key: bm
# --
\bm{$1}*
restart Aquamacs and open a .tex file and type in bm + Tab [this should insert the snippet]
A newline is added after the snippet. This is quite inconvenient since \bm{foo} is typically used in text style, so for example in "The vector \bm{x} is not the null vector". A typical cause of this is that the snippet ends with a newline which is then inserted, too. However, I specifically obtain this behavior even the snippet does not end with a newline.
I can't repro it with plain Emacs. In fact, I had this exact issue, but my problem is I had require-final-newline set to t. So Emacs was adding a newline at the end of my template.
My setup is a little more complicated but the solution for you is probably to set mode-require-final-newline to nil and restart Emacs.
To verify this is the problem, open up the template and check for the final newline.
Thanks to the answers in Temporarly disable adding of newlines in Emacs, I'm using a function to only temporarily disable the adding of final newlines in the current buffer:
(defun disable-final-newline ()
(interactive)
(set (make-local-variable 'require-final-newline) nil))
the reason why u got a new line is that your snippet has space or tab at the end.
Ctrl+e and Ctrl+k to kill them will make it works, nearly 1 hour to figure it out...
I had a similar issue with a few snippets, one of that was \frac{}{} which I use quite often.
The snippet version of frac that I use is not the one bundled with yasnippets.
The issue was that I edited some of the snippets in VIM and when you save the file, VIM automatically appends a newline to it.
To resolve it I had to remove the newline in a different editor e.g. emacs.

GNU Emacs: skeleton-mode, is it still used?

given all the possible solutions to have a template system with GNU Emacs, what do people use today ? I am still using skeleton-mode but as I read it here and there, we must be really few to do so.
What are you using and why ? (maybe I could switch to a more popular tool).
For example, given this snippet:
(define-skeleton mwe:cl-defpackage-skeleton
"Inserts a Common Lisp DEFPACKAGE skeleton."
(skeleton-read "Package: " (if v1
(file-name-sans-extension
(file-name-nondirectory
(buffer-file-name)))))
(if (setq v1 (bobp)) ";;; -*- Mode:Lisp; Syntax:ANSI-Common-Lisp;")
& (if buffer-file-coding-system
(concat " Coding:"
(symbol-name
(coding-system-get buffer-file-coding-system
'mime-charset))))
& " -*-"
& \n
& \n "(defpackage #:" str
\n "(:nicknames" ("Nickname: " " #:" str) & ")" | '(kill-whole-line -1)
\n "(:use #:CL" ((slime-read-package-name "USEd package: ") " #:" str) ")"
")" \n
\n
(if v1 "(in-package #:") & str & ")" & \n &
\n
_)
(credits: http://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/log/programming/lisp/defpackage-skeleton)
which (modern) template mode could do the same (and how ;)) ?
Cheers
For the record: even another 7 years later I am still very happy with skeletons. Lots of them available over there in my init files: https://github.com/ska2342/ska-init-files/blob/master/dot.emacs.d/init.el
I use yasnippet.
In my emacs I have this:
(require 'yasnippet-bundle)
In my hook for each mode where I want to use snippets (like my c-mode hook, etc), I have this:
(yas/minor-mode-on)
The "static" snippets I use are available, in the directory structure I use, here:
http://cheeso.members.winisp.net/srcview.aspx?dir=emacs&file=snippets.zip
You need to create the bundle .el file mentioned above, once, when any of the snippets change. do it this way:
(require 'yasnippet)
(yas/compile-bundle
; the starting point
"c:/your/path/yasnippet.el"
; the bundle file to generate
"c:/your/path/yasnippet-bundle.el"
; the snippet dir from which to generate the bundle
"c:/your/path/snippets")
That's it!
Then, when I'm in a C# file and type for<TAB>, I get a template with a for loop. And so on.
I also use yasnippet with dynamic snippet templates. A C# code-completion module I wrote calls yas/expand-snippet with a dynamically constructed string that defines the template to expand.
So, you can type
MyType.Method(<COMPLETE>
...where <COMPLETE> is the code-completion key, and the code-completion module does the lookup on the MyType.Method(, then builds a menu of choices, and pops it up. When the user selects a choice from the menu, the code-completion module builds the template, containing fields for each of the arguments for the selected method. Then it calls yas/expand-snippet and that template is injected into the buffer, just as if it had been a static template. In the dynamically-generated template, each argument to the method gets a "typeover" field, and I just fill it in, tabbing through the fields. Pretty nice.
This "dynamic snippet" idea would work with any code-completion engine. You just need a way to map from a method or function signature, like this:
function(int arg1, string arg2, char arg3)
to a yasnippet template definition string, which looks like this:
function(${1:int arg1}, ${2:string arg2}, ${3:char arg3})
And that's a pretty trivial piece of elisp.
I haven't used skeleton mode much, but I use YASnippet while coding in Ruby and C. Its pretty useful, but I suspect skeleton mode is far more powerful.
The emacs wiki lists Yasnippet as a possible replacement for skeleton. The snippets that come with yasnippet are pretty good, but you should really write your own, as the true power lies there.