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.
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 have installed Emacs on my FreeBSD 8.2 box. Everything works fine but I cannot use tabs. When I am editing a file with emacs and hit tab, nothing happens.
What could be causing this?
If you're new to Emacs, you might expect pressing TAB to insert a literal \T. For various reasons, that's not the way most Emacs modes work. Most editing modes auto-indent your code as needed (<tab> is bound toindent-for-tab-command rather than self-insert). If the line you're TABbing on is already at the correct indentation level, it might seem that nothing happened.
Auto-indenting like this is easier and more consistent than manually indenting, but doesn't give you as much flexibility when it comes to deciding exactly how much whitespace is going to be present at the beginning of each line (and it also causes some problems when you want to, for example, tab-separate some fields). You can auto-indent a region using C-M-\ (that's Ctrl + Alt + \).
If you absolutely, positively must insert a literal \T into your code somewhere, you can do so using C-q TAB (press and release Ctrl + q and then press TAB). Typically, this is done to align columns in other editors; if that's what you're doing, it's probably a better idea to use align-regexp rather than tab literals.
In fundamental and text-mode I use C-<TAB>. I do not know which other modes this works in, but with few exceptions, plain text is the only time I need an actual \t character.
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.
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.