looking for an equivalent cut and paste strategy that would replicate vim's 'cut til'. I'm sure this is googleable if I actually knew what it was called in vim, but heres what i'm looking for:
if i have a block of text like so:
foo bar (baz)
and I was at the beginning of the line and i wanted to cut until the first paren, in visual mode, I'd do:
ct (
I think there is probably a way to look back and i think you can pass more specific regular expressions. But anyway, looking for some emacs equivalents to doing this kind of text replacement. Thanks.
Here are three ways:
Just type M-dM-d to delete two words. This will leave the final space, so you'll have to delete it yourself and then add it back if you paste the two words back elsewhere.
M-z is zap-to-char, which deletes text from the cursor up to and including a character you specify. In this case you'd have to do something like M-2M-zSPC to zap up to and including the second space character.
Type C-SPC to set the mark, then go into incremental search with C-s, type a space to jump to the first space, then C-s to search forward for the next space, RET to terminate the search, and finally C-w to kill the text you selected.
Personally I'd generally go with #1.
as ataylor said zap-to-char is the way to go, The following modification to the zap-to-char is what exactly you want
(defun zap-up-to-char (arg char)
"Like standard zap-to-char, but stops just before the given character."
(interactive "p\ncZap up to char: ")
(kill-region (point)
(progn
(search-forward (char-to-string char) nil nil arg)
(forward-char (if (>= arg 0) -1 1))
(point))))
(define-key global-map [(meta ?z)] 'zap-up-to-char) ; Rebind M-z to our version
BTW don't forget that it has the ability to go backward with a negative prefix
That sounds like zap-to-char in emacs, bound to M-z by default. Note that zap-to-char will cut all the characters up to and including the one you've selected.
Related
I was just typing in this sort of code for Nth time:
menu.add_item(spamspamspam, "spamspamspam");
And I'm wondering if there's a faster way to do it.
I'd like a behavior similar to yasnippet's mirrors, except
I don't want to create a snippet: the argument order varies from
project to project and from language to language.
The only thing that's constant is the variable name that needs to be
repeated several times on the same line.
I'd like to type in
menu.add_item($,"")
and with the point between the quotes, call the shortcut and start typing,
and finally exit with C-e.
This seems advantageous to me, since there's zero extra cursor movement.
I have an idea of how to do this, but I'm wondering if it's already done,
or if something better/faster can be done.
UPD The yasnippet way after all.
Thanks to thisirs for the answer. This is indeed the yasnippet code I had initially in mind:
(defun yas-one-line ()
(interactive)
(insert "$")
(let ((snippet
(replace-regexp-in-string
"\\$" "$1"
(substring-no-properties
(delete-and-extract-region
(line-beginning-position)
(line-end-position))))))
(yas/expand-snippet snippet)))
But I'm still hoping to see something better/faster.
yasnippet can actually be used to create a snippet on-the-fly:
(defun yas-one-line ()
(interactive)
(let ((snippet (delete-and-extract-region
(line-beginning-position)
(line-end-position))))
(yas-expand-snippet snippet)))
Now just type:
menu.add_item($1,"$1")
and call yas-one-line. The above snippet is expanded by yasnippet!
You could try
(defvar sm-push-id-last nil)
(defun sm-push-id ()
(interactive)
(if (not sm-push-id-last)
(setq sm-push-id-last (point))
(text-clone-create sm-push-id-last sm-push-id-last
t "\\(?:\\sw\\|\\s_\\)*")
(setq sm-push-id-last nil)))
after which you can do M-x sm-push-id RET , SPC M-x sm-push-id RET toto and that will insert toto, toto. Obviously, this would make more sense if you bind sm-push-id to a convenient key-combo. Also this only works to insert a duplicate pair of identifiers. If you need to insert something else, you'll have to adjust the regexp. Using too lax a regexp means that the clones will tend to overgrow their intended use, so they may become annoying (e.g. you type foo") and not only foo but also ") gets mirrored on the previous copy).
Record a macro. Hit F3 (or possibly C-x (, it depends) to begin recording. Type whatever you want and run whatever commands you need, then hit F4 (or C-x )) to finish. Then hit F4 again the next time you want to run the macro. See chapter 17 of the Emacs manual for more information (C-h i opens the info browser, the Emacs manual is right at the top of the list).
So, for example, you could type the beginning of the line:
menu.add_item(spamspamspam
Then, with point at the end of that line, record this macro:
F3 C-SPC C-left M-w C-e , SPC " C-y " ) ; RET F4
This copies the last word on the line and pastes it back in, but inside of the quotes.
While this question concerns the formatting of LaTeX within Emacs (and maybe Auctex), I believe this can be applied to more general situations in Emacs concerning delimiters like parentheses, brackets, and braces.
I am looking to be able to do the following with Emacs (and elisp), and don't know where to begin. Say I have:
(This is in parentheses)
With some keybinding in Emacs, I want Emacs to find the matching delimiter to whichever one is by my cursor (something I know Emacs can do since it can highlight matching delimiters in various modes) and be able to change both of them to
\left( This is in parentheses \right)
The delimiters I would like this to work with are: (...), [...], \lvert ... \rvert, \langle ... \rangle, \{ ... \}. What elisp would I need to accomplish this task?
More general ways to handle matching delimiters are welcome.
Evaluate the command below in Emacs. After reloading you can put the point (text cursor) immediately after a closing paren. Then do M-x replace-matching-parens to replace the closing ) with \right) and the matching start paren ( with \left(.
(defun replace-matching-parens ()
(interactive)
(save-excursion
(let ((end-point (point)))
(backward-list)
(let ((start-point (point)))
(goto-char end-point)
(re-search-backward ")" nil t)
(replace-match " \\\\right)" nil nil)
(goto-char start-point)
(re-search-forward "(" nil t)
(replace-match "\\\\left( " nil nil)))))
The interactive bit indicates that I want a "command", so it can be executed using M-x. To avoid the cursor ending up in a strange place after execution I'm wrapping the logic in save-excursion. The point jumps back to the opening paren using backward-list and holds on to the start and end positions of the paren-matched region. Lastly, starting at the end and working backwards I replace the strings. By replacing backwards rather than forwards I avoid invalidating end-point before I need it.
Generalizing this to handle different kinds of delimiters shouldn't be too bad. backward-list ought to work with any pair of strings emacs recognizes as analogues of ( and ). To add more parenthesis-like string pairs, check out set-syntax-table in this Parenthesis Matching article.
Use global-set-key to setup a key binding to replace-matching-parens.
Fair warning: replace-matching-parens is the first elisp command I've implemented, so it may not align with best practices. To all the gurus out there, I'm open to constructive criticism.
In GNU Emacs there is a feature to highlight matching brackets in code with the same colour.
However when the code which the brackets enclose is really long with several nested if's for's etc. then this feature is not really useful since one of the brackets will not be visible.
Say I have the following,
for(int i=0; i< N; ++i)
{
/*Long code*/
}
If my cursor is on the } brace I would like to have some feature which will enable me to jump / see the { brace, and then , if satisfied, come back to the } brace for any future coding.
Is this possible in Emacs?
This is actually a very standard binding: C-M-f and C-M-b to go back and forwards by default. In most modes C-M-f will take you forwards to the matching brace and C-M-b will take you backwards to the matching brace. This also works for things like quotes, pretty much the same way.
These bindings are easy to remember if you already use C-f and C-b for navigation. (If you don't, you should.) They're just like moving forward and backwards by a character lifted to moving by expression (which depends on mode).
The first thing that might help is knowing about this option, if you don't already: blink-matching-paren-distance. If the sexp is very large then you need to increase the option value, or else paren matching gives up too soon and it shows a mismatch when there is no mismatch.
The second thing that can help is to be sure that blink-matching-paren and blink-matching-paren-on-screen are both non-nil. Then, to see the opening delimiter, just delete the closing delimiter and then type it again. When you insert it, the opening one will be made evident.
backward-sexp is what I use. bound to ESC-left. Then ESC-right to get back to where you were
Try mic paren which shows matching parenthesis code even if found outside the present screen.
(defun px-match-paren (arg)
"Go to the matching paren if on a paren; otherwise insert <key>."
(interactive "p")
(cond
((char-equal 41 (char-before)) (backward-list 1))
((char-equal 125 (char-before)) (backward-list 1))
((and
(char-equal 123 (char-before))
(char-equal 10 (char-after)))
(backward-char 1) (forward-list 1))
((looking-at "\\s\(") (forward-list 1))
((looking-at "\\s\)") (backward-list 1))
(t (self-insert-command (or arg 1)))))
The <key> to witch you bind this command will toggle opening and closing brace if point is before or after it, otherwise insert <key> (much like vi's "%")
I also bind C-<key> to forward-sexp and C-S-<key> to backward-sexp so I can really quickly navigate through functions in the file.
I have an UTF-8 file containing some Unicode characters like LEFT-TO-RIGHT OVERRIDE (U+202D) which I want to remove from the file. In Emacs, they are hidden (which should be the correct behavior?) by default. How do I make such "exotic" unicode characters visible (while not changing display of "regular" unicode characters like german umlauts)? And how do I replace them afterwards (with replace-string for example. C-X 8 Ret does not work for isearch/replace-string).
In Vim, its quite easy: These characters are displayed with their hex representation per default (is this a bug or missing feature?) and you can easily remove them with :%s/\%u202d//g for example. This should be possible with Emacs?
You can do M-x find-file-literally then you will see these characters.
Then you can remove them using usual string-replace
How about this:
Put the U+202d character you want to match at the top of the kill ring by typing M-:(kill-new "\u202d"). Then you can yank that string into the various searching commands, with either C-y (eg. query-replace) or M-y (eg. isearch-forward).
(Edited to add:)
You could also just call commands non-interactively, which doesn't present the same keyboard-input difficulties as the interactive calls. For example, type M-: and then:
(replace-string "\u202d" "")
This is somewhat similar to your Vim version. One difference is that it only performs replacements from the cursor position to the bottom of the file (or narrowed region), so you'd need to go to the top of the file (or narrowed region) prior to running the command to replace all matches.
I also have this issue, and this is particularly annoying for commits as it may be too late to fix the log message when one notices the mistake. So I've modified the function I use when I type C-x C-c to check whether there is a non-printable character, i.e. matching "[^\n[:print:]]", and if there is one, put the cursor over it, output a message, and do not kill the buffer. Then it is possible to manually remove the character, replace it by a printable one, or whatever, depending on the context.
The code to use for the detection (and positioning the cursor after the non-printable character) is:
(progn
(goto-char (point-min))
(re-search-forward "[^\n[:print:]]" nil t))
Notes:
There is no need to save the current cursor position since here, either the buffer will be killed or the cursor will be put over the non-printable character on purpose.
You may want to slightly modify the regexp. For instance, the tab character is a non-printable character and I regard it as such, but you may also want to accept it.
About the [:print:] character class in the regexp, you are dependent on the C library. Some printable characters may be regarded as non-printable, like some recent emojis (but not everyone cares).
The re-search-forward return value will be regarded as true if and only if there is a non-printable character. This is exactly what we want.
Here's a snippet of what I use for Subversion commits (this is between more complex code in my .emacs).
(defvar my-svn-commit-frx "/svn-commit\\.\\([0-9]+\\.\\)?tmp\\'")
and
((and (buffer-file-name)
(string-match my-svn-commit-frx (buffer-file-name))
(progn
(goto-char (point-min))
(re-search-forward "[^\n[:print:]]" nil t)))
(backward-char)
(message "The buffer contains a non-printable character."))
in a cond, i.e. I apply this rule only on filenames used for Subversion commits. The (backward-char) can be used or not, depending on whether you want the cursor to be over or just after the non-printable character.
Say I have a line in an emacs buffer that looks like this:
foo -option1 value1 -option2 value2 -option3 value3 \
-option4 value4 ...
I want it to look like this:
foo -option1 value1 \
-option2 value2 \
-option3 value3 \
-option4 value4 \
...
I want each option/value pair on a separate line. I also want those subsequent lines indented appropriately according to mode rather than to add a fixed amount of whitespace. I would prefer that the code work on the current block, stopping at the first non-blank line or line that does not contain an option/value pair though I could settle for it working on a selected region.
Anybody know of an elisp function to do this?
Nobody had what I was looking for so I decided to dust off my elisp manual and do it myself. This seems to work well enough, though the output isn't precisely what I asked for. In this version the first option goes on a line by itself instead of staying on the first line like in my original question.
(defun tcl-multiline-options ()
"spread option/value pairs across multiple lines with continuation characters"
(interactive)
(save-excursion
(tcl-join-continuations)
(beginning-of-line)
(while (re-search-forward " -[^ ]+ +" (line-end-position) t)
(goto-char (match-beginning 0))
(insert " \\\n")
(goto-char (+(match-end 0) 3))
(indent-according-to-mode)
(forward-sexp))))
(defun tcl-join-continuations ()
"join multiple continuation lines into a single physical line"
(interactive)
(while (progn (end-of-line) (char-equal (char-before) ?\\))
(forward-line 1))
(while (save-excursion (end-of-line 0) (char-equal (char-before) ?\\))
(end-of-line 0)
(delete-char -1)
(delete-char 1)
(fixup-whitespace)))
In this case I would use a macro. You can start recording a macro with C-x (, and stop recording it with C-x ). When you want to replay the macro type C-x e.
In this case, I would type, C-a C-x ( C-s v a l u e C-f C-f \ RET SPC SPC SPC SPC C-x )
That would record a macro that searches for "value", moves forward 2, inserts a slash and newline, and finally spaces the new line over to line up. Then you could repeat this macro a few times.
EDIT: I just realized, your literal text may not be as easy to search as "value1". You could also search for spaces and cycle through the hits. For example, hitting, C-s a few times after the first match to skip over some of the matches.
Note: Since your example is "ad-hoc" this solution will be too. Often you use macros when you need an ad-hoc solution. One way to make the macro apply more consistently is to put the original statement all on one line (can also be done by a macro or manually).
EDIT: Thanks for the comment about ( versus C-(, you were right my mistake!
Personally, I do stuff like this all the time.
But I don't write a function to do it unless I'll be doing it
every day for a year.
You can easily do it with query-replace, like this:
m-x (query-replace " -option" "^Q^J -option")
I say ^Q^J as that is what you'll type to quote a newline and put it in
the string.
Then just press 'y' for the strings to replace, and 'n' to skip the wierd
corner cases you'd find.
Another workhorse function is query-replace-regexp that can do
replacements of regular expressions.
and also grep-query-replace, which will perform query-replace by parsing
the output of a grep command. This is useful because you can search
for "foo" in 100 files, then do the query-replace on each occurrence
skipping from file to file.
Your mode may support this already. In C mode and Makefile mode, at least, M-q (fill-paragraph) will insert line continuations in the fill-column and wrap your lines.
What mode are you editing this in?