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I would like to create only a syntax highlighting minor mode for Emacs. I have the "Writing GNU Emacs Extensions" by O'Reilly, but it does not go into any depth of detail. Is there a simple tutorial for a real or fake programming language highlighting mode?
Thank you
Defining a custom Generic Mode is probably the best place to start. You can define basic syntax highlighting for a language as simply as the following snippet.
(require 'generic-x)
(define-generic-mode
'my-mode ;; name of the mode
'("//") ;; comments delimiter
'("function" "var" "return") ;; some keywords
'(("=" . 'font-lock-operator)
("+" . 'font-lock-operator) ;; some operators
(";" . 'font-lock-builtin)) ;; a built-in
'("\\.myext$") ;; files that trigger this mode
nil ;; any other functions to call
"My custom highlighting mode" ;; doc string
)
It's great for quickly defining some basic syntax highlighting for obscure languages. I even use it for log files in some cases.
EmacsWiki's Mode tutorial has a little more information on creating a major mode, in case you want to expand from syntax highlighting only.
You also might find it useful to look at this answer, which has a pointer to code that defines a minor mode to highlight certain key words - but only in strings and comments.
A minor mode is nicer if all you want is highlights - less baggage.
The relevant portions of the manual are for the function 'font-lock-add-keywords and the variable font-lock-keywords.
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i'm looking to find a way to beautify my code in MATLAB. I'm talking about tabs, deleting unnecessary spaces etc., the way Eclipse does it with Ctrl+Shift+F
The smart indentation (ctrl + I) is probably all you need (as #Matteo V and #Cris Luengo already mentioned).
However, there are a few other neat tricks that you might want to have a look at if you are really into code development:
Well, first have a look at the Improve Code Readability site of MATLAB. You could use the Apply smart indenting while typing option in the Preferences > MATLAB > Editor/Debugger > Language > Indenting section (it should be turned on per default but I like the Indent all functions setting). There are a bunch of other settings that you may want to explore
If you dig yourself deeper in the MATLAB IDE, you will notice that you can adjust almost everything to your preferences, but the way is not always documented in the web.... however, the local documentation (call doc) contains the info you may be looking for, see this blog-post
I am not aware of an automatic detection of double spaces or similar but you might end up writing your own little callback-function. Most languages ignore this anyway (perhaps except for Python). Code readability is usually a topic that the programmer(s) should care about... and not the machines ;)
Further tips:
respect the Right-hand text limit, which is the vertical gray line in your editor and shall indicate how many characters a single line of code should have as maximum. If it is a comment, wrap it. If it is an expression, try to outsource some commands to a dedicated variable
use equally long variable names. (There is no style guide as in Python, which says that you should use normal words and underscores etc) E.g. if you have two variables describing a commanded and a measured velocity, you could call them v_cmd and v_act and your code perfectly aligns if you apply the same manipulations to both variables ;)
use section. With %% (the space is important) at the beginning of a line in the editor, you create a section (you'll note the slight yellow background color and the bold writing that follows this command). It is convenient to structure your code. You can even run entire sections Editor-Tab > Run > Run section
Although there are programmers claiming that a good code speaks for itself (and therefore doesn't need any comments), to my experience writing comments has never been a bad idea. It improves the readability of your code
The answer might have been a bit elaborate for such an innocent question ... oO
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In matlab script editor, we can use double percent symbol to define a region. for example in the following matlab script, two region are defined:
%% region 1
a=1;
b=2;
%% region 2
c=7;
d=5;
The advantage of defining region is that you can just execute one region where the cursor locates rather than the whole script by press ctrl+enter.
if the cursor is at c=7; line, after pressing ctrl+enter, c=7 and d=5 will be executed while a=1 and b=2 will not be executed.
however, I have searched a lot from web to find something equivalent in ESS, there is no results.
There is a command 'eval region' in ESS, but I don't know how to define such a region.
Thanks in advance!
The region is emacs speak for the part of the text that you would (essentially) consider to be "highlighted" in a "normal"/GUI text editor.
You can read more about it in The Mark and the Region in the emacs manual.
As far as I know, there is no equivalent to the matlab behavior you are describing. The few times I have used matlab, though, I do recall finding it handy when poking at a problem using ad hoc scripts.
As Steve said select a region, then all the standard ESS evaluation commands will act on a region (C-c C-c,C-RET,C-M-x).
But, what you describe sounds very interesting. Would you mind giving the full description of the workflow and markup, and post it to ess-help mailing list for a more thorough discussion? I would be interested in implementing such a feature. Thanks.
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I want to learn the lisp language, since my editor is emacs, I prefer emacs lisp.
Can anyone give me some suggestions to learn lisp, emacs lisp, or common lisp?
What are the major differences between those two?
There's quite a bit of crossover, especially at the beginner level, so whichever you start with will mostly transfer to the other.
Some of the major differences:
ELisp traditionally used dynamic scoping rules; Common Lisp uses lexical scoping rules. With dynamic scoping, a function can access local variables declared in calling functions and has generally fallen out of favor. Starting with Emacs 24, Emacs allows optional lexical scoping on a file-by-file basis (and all files in the core distribution are progressively being converted).
Dynamically scoped ELisp doesn't have closures, which makes composing functions and currying difficult. There's a apply-partially function that works similarly to currying. Note that the lexical-let form introduced in Emacs 24 makes it possible to produce closures via lexical scoping.
Much of the Common Lisp library that has been built up over time isn't available in elisp. A subset is provided by the elisp cl package
elisp doesn't do tail-call optimization.
These Emacs-Wiki pages offer some info about the relation between the two Lisps and their differences:
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CommonLisp
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsLisp
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsLispLimitations
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Right now, I use most as my pager. While it has helpful syntax highlighting for man pages, it lacks colored syntax highlighting for anything else (I'm specifically looking for diff/C++).
Meanwhile, pygments is a wonderful program. I can easily make colorized output with it:
# ./pygmentize -f console256 ${file}
hg diff | ./pygmentize -f console256 -l diff
Now, I would like to be able to page the output, so I just use:
# ./pygmentize -f console256 ${file} | most
hg diff | ./pygmentize -f console256 -l diff | most
At this point, most dumps all the colorizing control characters to my screen like so:
^[[38;5;28;01mclass^[[39;00m ^[[38;5;21;01mheap_allocator^[[39;00m
{
^[[38;5;28;01mpublic^[[39;00m^[[38;5;241m:^[[39m
This is, of course, unreadable. I looked though the man page for most, but I couldn't find any "Hey, show those control characters as colors instead of printing them" options. less has the same garbage behavior as most, but more shows the colors perfectly fine, with the obvious limitations of being more.
Is there a pager that supports syntax highlighting or some crazy combination of parameters and programs I can string together to make this work? Ultimately, I would like to get diffs and logs from Mercurial to be highlighted, so maybe there is a shortcut in there...
Might I suggest vimpager?
First off, recent vim distributions (I believe 6.0 and above) come with a pager-esque-mode script. It's quite simple and functional, and operates similarly to less. Try: vim '+help less' +only.
Even better, however, Rafael Kitover has written a much more robust and powerful script called vimpager. It's available on GitHub (or vimscripts). If you are on OS X and using Homebrew, it's as easy as brew install vimpager.
At that point, you can simply set $PAGER=vimpager, or even alias less=vimpager. It works excellently.
less -R shows ANSI color sequences as-is (instead of expanding to caret notation). That'll make syntax highlighting work!
You can also create an environment variable LESS=-R to make this the default behavior. Similarly for other options; see man less.
Look for bat: A cat(1) clone with wings.
bat supports syntax highlighting for a large number of programming and markup languages.
It is not a pager, but it automatically redirects output to less if needed.
You might try using jed. Yes, it's a text editor, not a pager, but it's quite lightweight and the default install contains excellent colorschemes for a wide variety of file types and languages.
Jed has syntax highlighting modes for different languages, simillar to the emacs ones. For example if you piped a C program to it, you can turn on the highlighting by pressing 'ESC', then 'x', then typing 'c-mode' . If it is a php program - change the last part to 'php-mode' and so on ...
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Particularly, what is the best snippets package out there?
Features:
easy to define new snippets (plain text, custom input with defaults)
simple navigation between predefined positions in the snippet
multiple insertion of the same custom input
accepts currently selected text as a custom input
cross-platform (Windows, Linux)
dynamically evaluated expressions (embedded code) written in a concise programming language (Perl, Python, Ruby are preferred)
nicely coexists with others packages in Emacs
Example of code template, a simple for loop in C:
for (int i = 0; i < %N%; ++i) {
_
}
It is a lot of typing for such common code. I want to invoke a code template or snippet which inserts
that boilerplate code for me. Additionally it stops (on TAB or other keystroke) at %N% (my input replaces it) and final position of the cursor is _.
TextMate's snippets is the most closest match but it is not a cross-platform solution and not for Emacs.
The second closest thing is YASnippet (screencast shows the main capabilities). But it interferes with hippie-expand package in my setup and the embedded language is EmacsLisp which I'm not comfortable with outside .emacs.
EDIT: Posted my answer here to allow voting on YASnippet.
Personally, I've been using Dmacro for years (ftp://ftp.sgi.com/other/dmacro/dmacro.tar.gz).
Here's a review of it that also mentions some alternatives: http://linuxgazette.net/issue39/marsden.html
The EmacsWiki has a page of template engines.
Of these, I've used tempo in the (distant) past to add table support to html-helper-mode, but don't know how it has progressed in the last 15 years.
I'd add my vote for tempo snippets ... easy to setup, powerful (you can run arbitrary elisp in your template - so that you can downcase things, lookup filenames & classes, count things, etc), set the indentation, integrate with abbrevs ... I use it a lot ;)
I vote for http://cedet.sourceforge.net/srecode.shtml
It has very clean syntax and has access to code environment through Semantic.
Also it is a part of a large well supported CEDET distribution (which was built into Emacs for 24.x version series).
UPDATE YASnippet is also a powerful template engine. But it uses an ugly file naming schema (your file name === template name) for you can't put several templates into a single file and have issues with national character sets...
You can try a lightweight solution muban.el
It is written completely in Elisp and has a very simple syntax.