I am a newbie to emacs and have been using it only for a month.
My queries are:
I want to track the matching opening and closing braces in the editor. Is there a command for this?
When trying to use emacs using cygwin in Windows, C-x C-c to close emacs does not work!
Is there a way I can get this to work?
I personally like mic-paren, which has many options for customizing how to show matching parentheses, including showing you the line of the matching paren in the minibuffer when it is off-screen.
I set it up as follows:
(setq paren-dont-touch-blink t)
(require 'mic-paren)
(paren-activate)
(setq paren-match-face 'highlight)
(setq paren-sexp-mode t)
show-paren-mode will highlight matching parentheses, at least when the cursor is on one or the other.
A more powerful alternative is highlight parentheses mode. This will highlight all the parentheses around point (the cursor), so you see the scope of all the enclosing parentheses as you navigate your code.
There are other options as well, listed on the wiki.
Related
When working with my .emacs init file, I sometimes make a mistake. When I do eval-buffer, I get the message "end of file during parsing."
How do I ask Emacs to tell me the exact location of the error?
The first thing is to check the balancing of parentheses and string quotes.
For Emacs Lisp In GNU Emacs use M-x check-parens.
Other Emacs-like editors have similar commands. In LispWorks for example one can use M-x Find Unbalanced Parentheses.
These errors are very hard to actually locate.
Better try hard to avoid mismatching parenthesis at all. There are several built-in and 3rd-party minor modes that help you in this:
electric-pair-mode: Insert matching closing parenthesis automatically (built-in)
show-paren-mode: When point is over a parenthesis, highlight the matching one (built-in)
rainbow-delimiters-mode: Highlight each level of parenthesis in a different face
paredit-mode: Keep parenthesis balanced at all time. Generally, focus editing on Sexps instead of characters and words.
I'd recommend to enable all of these. A reasonable configuration to defeat mismatched parenthesis is thus:
(add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode-hook 'paredit-mode)
(add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode-hook 'rainbow-delimiters-mode)
(show-paren-mode 1)
(electric-pair-mode 1)
Paredit and Rainbow Delimiters are available from MELPA.
Recently while editing lisp code in emacs, I have been frustrated in tracking matching parenthesis. (show-paren-mode t) helps when the matching parenthesis is visable within the buffer along with its match, and (setq blink-matching-paren t) is helpful when writing the matching parenthesis. Is there a way to hook show-paren-mode so that the blink-mathing-open function evaluates as part of the "show" process? In this manner, I can place the cursor up to a parenthesis and know what it matches against without deleting and retyping it.
Thanks,
SetJmp
Try this
(defadvice show-paren-function (after blink activate)
(when (= ?\) (char-before (point)))
(blink-matching-open)))
Or, just use C-M-b and C-M-f to move back and forth between the point and the corresponding parenthesis.
My favorite paren package is mic-paren, which shows you the matching paren like you describe - it even works when the matching paren is offscreen (it shows some info in the echo area).
Download and put somewhere in your load-path, and add this to your .emacs:
(require 'mic-paren)
(paren-activate)
There are a number of configuration options you can choose from, read the comments at the top of the package.
How do I configure Emacs so that line wrapping does not break in the middle of a word?
If you want to emulate the behavior of an editor like Notepad, you might want to turn on visual line mode. While setting word-wrap will cause line wrapping at word boundaries, any action you take on a line (e.g., moving up/down or killing) will still respect the newline character. Visual line mode will treat each display line as though it had a newline at the end.
(visual-line-mode t)
Line to add in .emacs file:
(global-visual-line-mode t)
M-x toggle-truncate-lines disable allows you to disable visually line breaking.
M-x auto-fill-mode + M-q allows you to word wrap for real a pre-existing paragraph.
Add this to your init file:
(setq-default word-wrap t)
Alternatively, press C-h vword-wrap in Emacs and follow the "customize" link near the end.
I discovered longlines-mode only recently (I think I was spelunking through the Emacs Info documentation). It wraps as you would expect in other UI editors' word-wrap feature. It's especially useful when I'm reading or writing free text with no newlines (a la Microsoft Word) without the ugly mid-word wrapping that happens when you use M-x toggle-word-wrap.
See LongLines.
My configuration:
(setq longlines-wrap-follows-window-size t)
(global-set-key [(control meta l)] 'longlines-mode)
Vim completes words and lines with CTRL-X P and CTRL-L. There's a Emacs plugin called Company mode but this plugin interfere and cause conflicts with lots of things within Emacs (with global linum and yasnippets). I know that I can complete words with CTRL-/ in Emacs. But it is possible to take previously written lines to complete code?
Maybe you're looking for hippie-expand? From that web page (as of this writing, anyway):
HippieExpand looks at the word before
point and tries to expand it in
various ways including expanding from
a fixed list (like expand-abbrev),
expanding from matching text found in
a buffer (like dabbrev-expand) or
expanding in ways defined by your own
functions. Which of these it tries and
in what order is controlled by a
configurable list of functions.
For a comprehensive list of completion options visit the emacs wiki page on completion.
There are a gazillion ways to do completion in Emacs. Some are mode specific, some inline, some configurable and what not. Here is a list of modes that might help you.
Use numberic argument to complete by line, say M-5 M-/ will complete by line, while M-/ alone still complete the normal way.
hippe-expend function has a very useful feature which is :
With a positive numeric argument, jumps directly to the ARG next function in this list. With a negative argument or just C-u, undoes the expansion.
Customize the expansion functions in hippie-expand-try-functions-list and put the function try-expand-line as 5th list element, then you could use M-5 M-/ to complete by line.
This tip is very handy and useful and I highly recommend it.
Also worth noting: if your window manager does not steal Alt-tab, emacs will auto-complete with Alt-tab (I set up my window manager to user the "windows key" instead of alt for this very reason).
If you are using evil, this is the most vim-like solution I use:
(defun my-expand-lines ()
(interactive)
(let ((hippie-expand-try-functions-list
'(try-expand-line-all-buffers)))
(call-interactively 'hippie-expand)))
(define-key evil-insert-state-map (kbd "C-x C-l") 'my-expand-lines)
This way you can use our old friend C-x C-l in insert mode for whole line all buffers completion.
Thanks #ymln for the suggestion of using try-expand-line-all-buffers.
Notepad++ has a convenient feature: if you select a word in your text (not necessarily a keyword), the word is highlighted throughout the text. Can this be done in Emacs as well? And if so, how?
It doesn't necessarily have to work exactly like Notepad++ (i.e., via selection); ideally, I would like to set up a key binding that causes all occurrences of the word under cursor to be highlighted.
It would be great if the highlights were permanent, i.e., moving point away from a highlighted word should not cause the highlight to be removed.
Also, it would be useful if there was a solution that made it possible to navigate between highlights (using custom key bindings).
The hi-lock suggestions are good. I think it's easier to use the M-x versions, though:
M-x highlight-regexp RET <REGEXP>
M-x highlight-phrase RET <REGEXP>
highlight-phrase is just a bit of sugar around highlight-regexp that ignores case and translates a space in the regex to match arbitrary whitespace. Handy.
Maybe highlight-symbol.el at http://nschum.de/src/emacs/highlight-symbol/ is what you are looking for:
Type C-s, then type the current word or type C-w. As a bonus, you can now hit C-s again to search for the word.
This is called incremental search.
What I use is idle-highlight
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/IdleHighlight
M-x idle-highlight sets an idle timer that highlights all occurences in the buffer of the word under the point.
To enable it for all programming modes, in ~/.emacs.d/init.el:
;; highlight words
(add-hook 'prog-mode-hook (lambda () (idle-highlight-mode t)))
Light-symbol will highlight whatever symbol point is over.
Alternately, you can use occur, which lists all lines matching a regexp. It's useful to quickly see all functions in a class.
Nobody mentioned symbol-overlay mode. It's basically a better rewrite of highlight-symbol-mode. "Better" as in, lacks bugs of original highlight-symbol (such as, temporary highlight getting stuck, or the temporary highlight disappearing for moving inside the highlighted word; or not being able to highlight symbols like *), better integrated, and maintained. See "Advantages" paragraph of its README.
You can install it as usual, with M-xpackage-install (make sure to update package list beforehand with package-list-packages). For reference, at the bottom I attached code I use to enable the mode and disable a few of the more advanced features which you may or may not want.
Notepad++ has a convenient feature: if you select a word in your text (not necessarily a keyword), the word is highlighted throughout the text. Can this be done in Emacs as well? And if so, how?
Once you enable overlay-symbol, occurrences on the screen will be shown for every word that you put cursor upon after a timeout (timeout by default is 0.5s, can be configured with symbol-overlay-idle-time variable). If a word don't get highlighted, this means there's just one match on the screen (the one you put cursor upon), hence there's no need to highlight it.
It would be great if the highlights were permanent, i.e., moving point away from a highlighted word should not cause the highlight to be removed.
To highlight the word under cursor permanently there's a function symbol-overlay-put. To unhighlight call it once again.
In my config example it's bound to Logo+` key.
(require 'symbol-overlay)
(defun enable-symbol-overlay-mode ()
(unless (or (minibufferp)
(derived-mode-p 'magit-mode)
(derived-mode-p 'xref--xref-buffer-mode))
(symbol-overlay-mode t)))
(define-global-minor-mode global-symbol-overlay-mode ;; name of the new global mode
symbol-overlay-mode ;; name of the minor mode
enable-symbol-overlay-mode)
(global-symbol-overlay-mode) ;; enable it
(global-set-key (kbd "s-`") 'symbol-overlay-put)
(setq symbol-overlay-ignore-functions nil) ;; don't ignore keywords in various languages
(setq symbol-overlay-map (make-sparse-keymap)) ;; disable special cmds on overlays
This may not be as nice as what you were hoping but if you put
(global-hi-lock-mode 1)
in your .emacs file then you can type C-x w h REGEX <RET> <RET> to highlight all occurances of REGEX, and C-x w r REGEX <RET> to unhighlight them again. Again, not as elegant as you'd probably like, but it'll work.
Try http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/msearch.el
All occurences of the text selected with the cursor are highlighted.
You have to drag over the string which you want to highlight. That enables you to easily change the selection without changing the highlight.
If you want to preserve the highlighting of a string you can freeze it.
You can enslave a buffer to another buffer. Text selected in the master buffer will also be highlighted in the slave buffer. That is useful for comparing buffers.
It is also useful for taking notes in one buffer while you investigate the text in another one. You can have a collection of keywords in the notes buffer. Drag over such a keyword and its occurences in the investigated text will be highlighted.
I am using this stuff for years now. I added the freezing quite recently. So, maybe something is broken. If this is the case leave me a note on http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/msearch or here.
Check Interactive Highlighting
Should be:
C-x w h word <RET> <RET>
Try iedit. It highlights the word at point and lets you edit all occurrences of it easily. With an additional keystroke (C-'), it hides all the lines without that word in it. Very handy!
Commands in library highlight.el
let you (un)highlight text matching a regexp (in this case a symbol), using overlays or text properties. You can cycle among the occurrences. Highlighting can be temporary or persistent. (more info).
This maybe won't highlight but will search for a word without you needing to type it...
when you've reached the word you wanted to search, C-S, then read the full word with C-W then you can C-S and it will search for it. In my Emacs it also highlights all instances in the document.
This package available in Melpa works, you can customize the highlight style as well.
https://github.com/ignacy/idle-highlight-in-visible-buffers-mode