I am looking for shortcuts or functions to add one tab to all lines in the selection. Also how to reduce one tab to all lines in the selection?
There are multiple references for this. But I could not find one that mimics use of tab and shift-tab on selected text as in regular editors like geany. There one can select multiple lines and then use tab or shift-tab to move text left and right till one finds it best.
I found C-x tab <left> or <right> : this moves all lines in the selection to left or right one space at a time. C-5 C-x tab move it 5 spaces but then stops. But I want these lines to move tab spaces at a time while keeping the selection so that I can repeat or undo the process. How can I do that?
Basically, I need a function which I can call after selecting some lines. It should:
Detect the selected lines
On pressing a key (say 1 on num pad) it should move selected text to left by 5 spaces (and keeping the selection)
On pressing another key (say 3 on num pad), it should move selected text to right by 5 spaces (and keep selection)
The function should end on pressing ENTER.
Can above ability be added to C-x tab shortcut, which works exactly like that (with left and right keys) but it moves selected text only one space at a time.
I am looking for shortcuts or functions to add one tab to all lines in the selection.
First select a region.
C-SPC [set-mark-command]
Select region of lines, with the mark at beginning of first line and the point at the beginning of last last line (or vice versa), and then
C-x r t [string-rectangle]
C-q TAB [quoted-insert]
I found C-x TAB <left> or <right>: this moves all lines in the selection to left or right one space at a time.
Did you see on option for hitting S-<left> and S-<right>? That should do it for you, Shift + Right, perhaps only depending on what mode you are in and whether indent-tabs-mode is enabled.
If you use evil-mode, you have the key > that indents the current line or the selection to one level, according to the mode. I don't know how to make it insert tabs. By a quick look at the documentation by keywords (C-h d indent tab RET) it looks like we have the variable indent-tabs-mode:
indentation can insert tabs if this is non nil
More generally, this doesn't seem to suit your requirements but nearly in that it helps on indenting multiple lines in a row and repeatedly: indent-tools (on melpa) (my toy). It's meant for indentation-based files (so yaml, python,…) and it gives an hydra (which helps to repeat the actions) with the commands: indent or de-indent the current block of indentation, the paragraph, etc, and the same to comment, delete, fold, and move around blocks of indentation.
in emacs, how can I navigate to the beginning or end of some text like this:
test_rejects_requests_when_given_token_is_invalid
In vim I would do capital E if in command mode but I am not sure how to do this in emacs.
Press ctrl-a for move-beginning-of-line, and ctrl-e for move-end-of-line.
Try C-M-left and C-M-right, each of which is backward-sexp and forward-sexp, respectively. If you don't want to use arrow keys, then C-M-b and C-M-f also works.
M-m for back-to-indentation takes you to the first text part of the line. This is useful since most of the time code is indented and you don't want to go to the actual beginning of the line (like C-a). As songyuanyao said, C-e takes you to the end of the line.
Noob to emacs. I would like to create a shortcut in emacs to insert 4 space from current cursor position and remove 4 white spaces from current cursor position.
May be map it to C > and C <
Can somebody help me with this ?
Thanks in advance
zer0 0ne
You can replicate any key as many times as you want by adding a numeric prefix:
ESC <number> <key>
so you can do:
ESC 4 SPACE
or
ESC 4 BACKSPACE
if you want to make it permanent, define a macro for each and name it, and then assign it to a keystroke. see this for more details:
http://emacswiki.org/emacs/KeyboardMacros
or you make a function, but for this purpose is an overkill, I feel.
-dmg
You can easily map a key or keys to insert or delete spaces if you really want to, but that's not the Emacs Way. Customize c-mode to indent the way you want it to, and then you'll never have to manually tweak indentation again (and when you are looking at someone else's code and want to reindent it the way you like you just have to mark the whole buffer and type M-x indent-region--oh, the power!).
Emacs manual on customizing C mode
Emacs Wiki
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.