How can I enable line wrap on word boundaries only in Emacs? - emacs

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)

Related

end-of-visual-line go to beginning of next line in Emacs

I want to use beginneing-of-visual-line and end-of-visual-line.
So I wrote in .emacs like following.
(global-set-key "\C-a" 'beginning-of-visual-line)
(global-set-key "\C-e" 'end-of-visual-line)
beginning-of-visual-line works as I hoped.
But if I use C-e in visually multiple lines, cursor go to the beginning of next line.
Why is this happens? And how can I fix it?
I'm using Emacs 24.3 (9.0) in Mac OS X 10.7.5.
I think in general, end-of-line will position the point on the next character after the end of the line.
I find this helpful when coding in lisp, because it places the point in the perfect place to evaluate the previous s-exp easily.
However, in the case of end-of-visual line, the first character after the end of the line is actually on the next visual line. If you want the point to be on the last character of the current visual line, you could just go back one character, like this:
(global-set-key (kbd "C-e") '(lambda ()
(interactive)
(end-of-visual-line)
(backward-char)))
Edit
A much better way of achieving the same thing - which will fix the point in your comment, is just to enable visual-line-mode:
(global-visual-line-mode 1)
This will automatically make your C-a and C-e work with visual lines.
The only problem with visual-line mode is that by default, there are no indicators showing where the line is wrapped. To fix this, you can use:
(setq visual-line-fringe-indicators '(left-curly-arrow right-curly-arrow))
You'll need to put the visual-line-fringe-indicators assignment before the global-visual-line-mode call in your .emacs for it to work.
Source for the above: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/VisualLineMode

matching opening and closing braces in emacs

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.

Emacs word wrap at a specific column number

I like to run my editor full-screen. The only thing is, though, that when I do this, the word wrap only kicks in when the line hits the right edge of the screen. I would like it to do so, already when the line hits, say, column number 200.
How do I do that?
I would like it to happen in all modes, e.g., Org-mode. I added the line (global-visual-line-mode t) to my .emacs file, in order for the word wrapping also to work in org-mode.
I'm running Emacs 23.
I got it working! Here is what I added to my .emacs file to make it happen:
(add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'turn-on-auto-fill)
(add-hook 'text-mode-hook
'(lambda() (set-fill-column 80)))
Type M-x auto-fill-mode to activate automatic line-wrapping after a certain column. Then set the actual line width through the variable fill-column as described by user choroba (C-x f).
Note though that this works a bit differently from what other text editors do. M-q will re-format the current paragraph.
You can set the line width with C-xf (set-fill-column).
Afterwards, you might need to hit M-q to reformat the current paragraph (fill-paragraph), or select text to be justified and run fill-region.
The suggestion for turn-on-auto-fill will work if you want hard newlines in the files you're editing. If not, and you just want word-wrap, consider instead visual-fill-column-mode, which just does the normal word-wrap that would happen at the edge of the window, but at the specified fill-column.
See the Emacs manual (C-h r), node Filling. See in particular the first subnode in the menu, Auto Fill.

Turn off Emacs Whitespace-mode "Long Line" Visualization

I personally keep all lines under 80 characters, but I also work on projects in teams where other programmers don't care about line length.
I love using whitespace-mode, but the long line visualization is really annoying when I'm working on projects where I shouldn't interfere with the long lines. It seems like it should be easy to turn off the long line visualization---I hit m-x global-whitespace-toggle-options l, and then can hit m-x global-whitespace-toggel-options ? to confirm that the "long-line visualization" is turned off. But long lines are still highlighted. I kill buffers and reload them, and highlighting is still there. I'm definitely using global, not local, whitespace-mode.
Why can't I turn off the long line visualization?
The last time I customized whitespace-mode, I noticed that my changes to the settings didn't have any effect in buffers that already existed; try recreating the buffer, or leaving and reentering whitespace-mode. In case you don't already know, you can use M-x customize-group whitespace to turn off that particular option entirely, rather than doing it manually.
Edit: Specifically you want to customize the whitespace-style variable. This lets you turn on and off individual styles. In this case you should turn off the ones labelled "(Face) Lines" and "(Face) Lines, only overlong part". The former changes the face of the whole line when it is overly long, while the latter only changes the face of the part that extends past the threshold.
(Other options in this group define the faces that whitespace-mode will use to highlight the styles you've turned on, the regexes it uses to identify certain situations, etc, but usually you only care about whitespace-style).
Set whitespace-line-column to a higher value (default is 80), so the highlighting of long lines doesn't kick in:
(setq whitespace-line-column 250)
I'm assuming that you already have whitespace-mode activated somewhere in your init.el or similar. If so, you can adapt duma's comment above, and either
Edit the elisp that sets whitespace-style to remove lines-tail. E.g., Emacs Prelude sets
(setq whitespace-style '(face tabs empty trailing lines-tail))
Simply change that to
(setq whitespace-style '(face tabs empty trailing))
If you don't want to directly edit that elisp, but rather override it later with your own code, do something like
(setq whitespace-style (delete 'lines-tail whitespace-style))
Unfortunately, if running Prelude with auto-loaded buffers (using something like Emacs Desktop), the initial setting will take precedence: for each buffer on which you want to see whitespace-style displayed as directed, you must [1]
kill the buffer
re-open the buffer
[1]: Note to OP: if there's another way to reload a buffer, please edit or comment this answer. I was hoping to find something like M-x reload-buffer but am not seeing anything like that with C-h a buffer.

How to highlight all occurrences of a word in an Emacs buffer?

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