How can I script vim to run perltidy on a buffer? - perl

At my current job, we have coding-style standards that are different from the ones I normally follow. Fortunately, we have a canned RC file for perltidy that I can apply to reformat files before I submit them to our review process.
I have code for emacs that I use to run a command over a buffer and replace the buffer with the output, which I have adapted for this. But I sometimes alternate between emacs and vim, and would like to have the same capabilities there. I'm sure that this or something similar is simple and had been done and re-done many times over. But I've not had much luck finding any examples of vim-script that seem to do what I need. Which is, in essence, to be able to hit a key combo (like Ctrl-F6, what I use in emacs) and have the buffer be reformatted in-place by perltidy. While I'm a comfortable vim-user, I'm completely clueless at writing this sort of thing for vim.

After trying #hobbs answer I noticed that when filtering the entire buffer through perltidy the cursor returned to byte 1, and I had to make a mental note of the original line number so I could go back after :Tidy completed.
So building on #hobbs' and #Ignacio's answers, I added the following to my .vimrc:
"define :Tidy command to run perltidy on visual selection || entire buffer"
command -range=% -nargs=* Tidy <line1>,<line2>!perltidy
"run :Tidy on entire buffer and return cursor to (approximate) original position"
fun DoTidy()
let l = line(".")
let c = col(".")
:Tidy
call cursor(l, c)
endfun
"shortcut for normal mode to run on entire buffer then return to current line"
au Filetype perl nmap <F2> :call DoTidy()<CR>
"shortcut for visual mode to run on the current visual selection"
au Filetype perl vmap <F2> :Tidy<CR>
(closing " added to comments for SO syntax highlighting purposes (not required, but valid vim syntax))
DoTidy() will return the cursor to its original position plus or minus at most X bytes, where X is the number of bytes added/removed by perltidy relative to the original cursor position. But this is fairly trivial as long as you keep things tidy :).
[Vim version: 7.2]
EDIT: Updated DoTidy() to incorporate #mikew's comment for readability and for compatibility with Vim 7.0

My tidy command:
command -range=% -nargs=* Tidy <line1>,<line2>!
\perltidy (your default options go here) <args>
If you use a visual selection or provide a range then it will tidy the selected range, otherwise it will use the whole file. You can put a set of default options (if you have any) at the point where I wrote (your default options go here), but any arguments that you provide to :Tidy will be appended to the perltidy commandline, overriding your defaults. (If you use a .perltidyrc you might not have default args -- that's fine -- but then again you might want to have a default like --profile=vim that sets up defaults only for when you're working in vim. Whatever works.)

The command to filter the entire buffer through an external program is:
:%!command
Put the following in ~/.vimrc to bind it to Ctrl-F6 in normal mode:
:nmap <C-F6> :%!command<CR>
For added fun:
:au Filetype perl nmap <C-F6> :%!command<CR>
This will only map the filter if editing a Perl file.

Taking hobbs' answer a step further, you can map that command to a shortcut key:
command -range=% -nargs=* Tidy <line1>,<line2>!perltidy -q
noremap <C-F6> :Tidy<CR>
And another step further: Only map the command when you're in a Perl buffer (since you probably wouldn't want to run perltidy on any other language):
autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.pl,*.plx,*.pm command! -range=% -nargs=* Tidy <line1>,<line2>!perltidy -q
autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.pl,*.plx,*.pm noremap <C-F6> :Tidy<CR>
Now you can press Ctrl-F6 without an active selection to format the whole file, or with an active selection to format just that section.

Instead of creating a new keyboard shortcut, how about replacing the meaning of the = command which is already in people's finger memory for indenting stuff? Yes, perlcritic does more than just indent but when you use perlcritic anyways, then you probably don't want to go back to the inferior "just indent" = command. So lets overwrite it!
filetype plugin indent on
autocmd FileType perl setlocal equalprg=perltidy
And now we can use = just like before but with the added functionality of perlcritic that goes beyond just indenting lines:
== run perlcritic on the current line
5== run perlcritic on five lines
=i{ Re-indent the 'inner block', i.e. the contents of the block
=a{ Re-indent 'a block', i.e. block and containing braces
=2a{ Re-indent '2 blocks', i.e. this block and containing block
gg=G run perlcritic on the entire buffer
And the best part is, that you don't have to learn any new shortcuts but can continue using the ones you already used with more power. :)

I'm used to select text using line oriented visual Shift+V and then I press : an I have !perltidy -pbp -et4 somewhere in history so I hit once or more up arrow ⇧.

Related

Shell script mode automatically at each emacs start

Each time when I edit bash script I type a command M-x shell-script-mode. And then I get nice shell code higlighting. How to get it automatically each time I start emacs so I do not have to type the command. When I added (shell-script-mode) to init.el it did not help.
You can set the default major mode to be whatever you want by adding
(setq-default major-mode 'shell-script-mode)
to your init file. That will ensure that any newly created buffer will be in shell-script-mode unless its mode is specified otherwise (e.g. through auto-mode-alist). Whether it's a good idea or not, I don't know: I probably would not want that to be my default setting - but to each her/his own.
One of the simplest ways to have Emacs set the desired mode for a buffer editing a file is to include a special comment in the first line of that file, e.g. for a shell script your first line might be:
# -*-sh-*-
For scripts it is also common, or and often even required, to have an interpreter file comment on the very first line of the file, which of course would preclude having an Emacs mode comment, so Emacs also looks for interpreter file comments and associates those with a major mode, so the first line of your shell script might be:
#!/bin/sh
There are a number of other ways to tell Emacs how to set the buffer mode when visiting a file. See, for example, Emacs Manual: Choosing File Modes

Ansi-coloured file editing

Context
Have some transcript files from terminal interaction, obtained using traditional Unix command "script".
Those transcripts contain lots of control character (like backspace when editing shell commands), and lots of color code sequences as result of running various commands. Occasionally, even colorful full-terminal (ncurses-based) applications like "emacs -nw" or "aptitude" were run.
At program runtime, TERM environment variable was set as "xterm".
Need 1: read (more or less solved)
I need to read those files again and sometimes copy-paste some small parts.
The trouble is : while one color change here and there is not so much of a problem, their actual density makes the output barely readable. Worse, edited command lines (with cursor jumps and edited words) are completely unreadable.
"Okay" solution
Browse through files using e.g. "less -r". Paging forward in the same terminal setup reproduces the various color and character style.
But many other features come out more or less broken, e.g. search backwards produces jumbled terminal output, often have to pres "Ctrl-L" to clean thing up.
Need 2: editing
My preferred editor is emacs. Some people have had a similar situation when running the shell inside emacs, e.g. Something wrong with Emacs shell.
Here is not the same situation. Examples of differences: here we don't have to run an actual shell, but we need to move cursor freely like in usual editing.
Editing here means easily open such a transcript file in editor and then:
at all times through editing, see character changes (color, attributes) as conveyed by the terminal codes
(optional) some character that are neighbour on the terminal grid but are separated in file by some control characters would have a visual hint about this
ability to insert some text,
delete sections,
use all editor features like search/replace etc.
copy & paste to & from file (including to external programs, which would receive just plain text)
in my wildest dreams, some kind of "flatten" action, like select a sequence with a heavily edited command line and replace it with a simple series of characters as if it was typed in one run. "Visual hints" mentioned above would disappear.
Type Alt-: to evaluate something in the minibuffer. Evaluate (ansi-color-apply-on-region (point-min) (point-max)) and it will convert ansi color codes to be font colors.

vim + janus / indent a perl block

using vim + janus (https://github.com/carlhuda/janus)
is enabled by default in .vim/vimrc
filetype plugin indent on
i'm writing perl, every newline is indented by default.
how i can select a block (or the full document) and
reindent automatically?
You can select the block by going to visual mode (press v or Shift + v or Ctrl + v in normal mode). Reindent can be done pressing = after selection of the block.
To apply the same formatting to the whole document you can use:
gg=G which means "go to the beginning", "reformat" until "end of document".
You can use :help = to get more information on reformatting.
If your block is a paragraph separated by empty line you, can use vip to select it quickly.
See :help text-objects for more information.
Since you're asking about perl I'm assuming "blocks" are identified by { and }. If that's the case, I'd suggest indenting the block by using one of the following from somewhere inside the block:
>i{ to forcibly indent all lines by one shiftwidth
=i{ to reindent the block per the indent rules for perl
I personally prefer the latter, but if you have some non-standard indentation you don't want to screw up inside the block then you'd want to use the prior.
This takes advantage of vim's "Block" text objects to operate on only the desired text.

How to force emacs to use \n instead of \r\n

I have to use windows to write some shell scripts. I decided to use emacs, but I get a weird error when running the script:
/bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that looks like the shebang ends in \r\n instead of just \n. How can I tell emacs to only write \n? I'm in Shell-script major mode. It's quite surprising this isn't fixed by default.
As Jürgen mentioned, you need to use the set-buffer-file-coding-system. You can say
(set-buffer-file-coding-system 'unix)
and stick that into a function inside the find-file-hook so that it will set it for all the buffers you open. Alternatively, you can put it inside the write-file-hook list so that the file-coding-system is set properly before you dump the file to disk.
For a simpler way out, if you're using the GUI version of Emacs, you can click on the 3rd character in the modeline from the left. It's to toggle between eol formats.
Use:
set-buffer-file-coding-system
(should be bound to a key-sequence) before saving the file.

Is there any way to enable code completion for Perl in vim?

Surprisingly as you get good at vim, you can code even faster than standard IDEs such as Eclipse. But one thing I really miss is code completion, especially for long variable names and functions.
Is there any way to enable code completion for Perl in vim?
Ctrl-P (Get Previous Match) and Ctrl-N (Get Next Match) are kind of pseudo code completion. They basically search the file (Backwards for Ctrl-P, Forwards for Ctrl-N) you are editing (and any open buffers, and if you are using TAGS anything in your TAG file) for words that start with what you are typing and add a drop down list. It works surprisingly well for variables and function names, even if it isn't intellisense. Generally I use Ctrl-P as the variable or function I am looking for is usually behind in the code. Also if you keep the same copy of Vim open, it will search the files you have previously opened.
Vim 7 supports omni completion.
For example, I have this in my vimrc
autocmd FileType php set omnifunc=phpcomplete#CompletePHP
and then, when I press Ctrl-X Ctrl-O in Insert mode, I get a dropdown list of autocomplete possibilities.
Here's an omnicfunc for perl. No idea how well it works though.
Well, Vim's generic completion mechanism is surprisingly good, just using Ctrl-N in insert mode. Also, line completion is very handy, using C-x C-l.
Also check out this vim script for perl.
The standard Ctrl+N and Ctrl+P works even better if you add the following to your ~/.vim/ftplugin/perl.vim file:
set iskeyword+=:
Then it will autocomplete module names, etc.
The .vimrc clip in one of the other answers is slightly wrong. To turn your tab key into an auto-complete key, use this code:
inoremap <tab> <c-r>=InsertTabWrapper()<cr>
function! InsertTabWrapper()
let col = col('.') - 1
if !col || getline('.')[col - 1] !~ '\k'
return "\<tab>"
else
return "\<c-p>"
endif
endfunction
You can find this, and tons of other vim tricks in this thread at Perlmonks--which links to even more threads with lots more customizations.
You should look at the SuperTab plugin:
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1643
It let's you do completion (either the OmniCompletion or the regular completion) using tab and shift-tab instead of ^N and ^P.
https://github.com/c9s/perlomni.vim
Ctrl+N
This is explained in the Perl Hacks book, along with how to do Package completion. Highly recommended.