Is anyone aware of an emacs mode or function that will reformat a buffer holding a delimited file such that each delimiter (e.g. tab) defines a "column" with the width of each column set to the longest entry?
I can reset the tab-width variable but that makes all columns equal width. I would much prefer variable-width columns if possible (like how a spreadsheet program like excel would display such a file after resizing the columns).
Check out Org mode's table editor.
Org-mode as suggested by huaiyuan did just what I wanted.
To give an example to others, after I installed org-mode I found the following to work well.
Open a new file in org-mode C-x C-f table.org and then M-x org-table-import to import the delimited file, and you're done.
The C-| command didn't work for me to convert pre-existing buffer contents into a table, it just inserted a new table, but I don't know org-mode yet.
Let's assume your delimiter is TAB. Mark the whole buffer, then:
C-u M-x align-regexp \(\s-*\)TAB RET RET RET y
Where TAB in there is an actual tab char. See my similar answer here:
how to align arguments to functions in emacs?
Related
Is there any command to select the whole file contents in Emacs?
For example, Control+a selects whole contents of a file in Notepad, Notepad++, etc.
I can select whole contents using the mouse, but it's inconvenient for large files. I found the basic Emacs commands here and here, but could not find what I am looking for.
C-x h will select the entire buffer.
You can search for help within Emacs using the built-in help system.
C-h f will look for help for specific functions. In this case, you could have searched for whole-buffer to find mark-whole-buffer.
Other help commands of interest would be:
C-h m to show available commands for the current modes
C-h v for help related to variables
C-h k to find which functions keys are bound to
C-h w to see which key bindings are defined for a given function
C-h ? to see which other options are available.
Note that C-x h will only highlight all the text. To actually copy the selected text, you must use C-w for cut (kill-region) or M-w for copy (kill-ring-save).
I use CUA, so I didn't like mark-whole-buffer because it doesn't use a temporary region.
After much messing about, I finally achieved this using a keyboard macro saved to a function:
Define a macro which selects the whole buffer
Run kmacro-name-last-macro to name the macro
Use insert-kbd-macro to script it out
Now you can copy it into your config & map it to a key, like C-a
Copying and selecting are related, but distinct, actions. A file and a buffer are also related, but distinct.
To copy a buffer, consider using jac.el. It handles both the "copying" and dealing with modes.
I am using Emacs and just built AUCTeX for LaTeX. Anyway, as I was using column-marker extension while writing in LaTeX without AUCTeX, it is not working anymore with it. I was looking over the internet but couldn't find any help. Is there an elisp code line that allows to use column-marker on AUCTeX?
It works for me in emacs 24.3.1 with the built-in auctex and column-marker.el Update #: 312.
Here you have got an example (right window):
The deviation from the straight line comes from the different fonts/font sizes used for the caret and exponent, for the section titles and so on.
Inspite of that column-marker shows one the column with the specific character distance from the beginning of line.
Is there any tricky ways to do this: in my text files I have a list of words, one word a line. I want search the word new-word in the lists with C-s. In order to search it I need to type the word in the minibuffer, if the new-word isn't exist in the lists, I want to insert it in the list. It seems that I have to retype the word in the normal buffer, is there any ways to remember the word that I have just typed in the minibuffer and copy it into the normal buffer?
Pressing RET immediately after C-s allows you to input the string using the normal minibuffer prompt which supports editing and history of past searches. In that mode you can use the regular buffer commands, such as C-SPC, M-w and C-y, to copy contents from the search minibuffer and paste it into a regular buffer, or vice versa.
Everytime I insert a snippet (with yasnippet) in a .tex document, I obtain a newline after the snippet. This is quite annoying for small snippets that are typically used in text style. How can I avoid that?
I read a bit about the problem (http://code.google.com/p/yasnippet/issues/detail?id=115 or http://yasnippet.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/faq.html) but couldn't find a solution. Reproduce it as follows (I work with Aquamacs 2.3a on Mac OS X 10.6.8 with yasnippet version 0.6.1c):
Define ~/Library/Preferences/Aquamacs Emacs/Preferences.el to be:
(require 'yasnippet)
(yas/initialize)
(yas/load-directory "~/Library/Preferences/Aquamacs Emacs/plugins/yasnippet-0.6.1c/snippets")
define the following snippet (call it "bm.yasnippet" [bm = boldmath]; the star * symbolizes where the cursor ends -- note that there is no newline after the snippet)
# name: \bm{}{}
# key: bm
# --
\bm{$1}*
restart Aquamacs and open a .tex file and type in bm + Tab [this should insert the snippet]
A newline is added after the snippet. This is quite inconvenient since \bm{foo} is typically used in text style, so for example in "The vector \bm{x} is not the null vector". A typical cause of this is that the snippet ends with a newline which is then inserted, too. However, I specifically obtain this behavior even the snippet does not end with a newline.
I can't repro it with plain Emacs. In fact, I had this exact issue, but my problem is I had require-final-newline set to t. So Emacs was adding a newline at the end of my template.
My setup is a little more complicated but the solution for you is probably to set mode-require-final-newline to nil and restart Emacs.
To verify this is the problem, open up the template and check for the final newline.
Thanks to the answers in Temporarly disable adding of newlines in Emacs, I'm using a function to only temporarily disable the adding of final newlines in the current buffer:
(defun disable-final-newline ()
(interactive)
(set (make-local-variable 'require-final-newline) nil))
the reason why u got a new line is that your snippet has space or tab at the end.
Ctrl+e and Ctrl+k to kill them will make it works, nearly 1 hour to figure it out...
I had a similar issue with a few snippets, one of that was \frac{}{} which I use quite often.
The snippet version of frac that I use is not the one bundled with yasnippets.
The issue was that I edited some of the snippets in VIM and when you save the file, VIM automatically appends a newline to it.
To resolve it I had to remove the newline in a different editor e.g. emacs.
I have 2 columns, separated by comma. How can I swap those columns with Emacs?
I have the following:
column 1,column2
x1,x2
y1,y2
f1,f2
and I want it like this:
column2,column 1
x2,x1
y2,y1
f2,f1
Use M-x query-replace-regexp and then:
\(.+\),\(.+\)
as replace regexp and
\2,\1
for replacement.
In Emacs, you need to escape grouping parentheses with \. So, above regexp would be usually written as
(.+),(.+)
which means that you want everything before comma in first group and everything after comma in second group.
\2,\1
means: write second group, then comma, then first group.
While you can apply techniques given by other people, you can also use the org-mode tables.
Once you convert the data into org-mode table, it is very easy to swap the columns by simple keystrokes. You can have M-x org-mode, select the region then do M-x org-table-convert-region, and then M- on the right most column. I am not sure, how to export the data as CSV, but that should be very easy for you with replace-regexp. This can be helpful: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/org/Tables.html#Tables
Similar to the answer given by #darioo, type the following into the top of your buffer:
(query-replace-regexp "\\(.*?\\),\\(.*\\)" "\\2,\\1")
Then, put your cursor at the end of this line and press ctrl-x, ctrl-e.
You will have an interactive search-and-replace for which you press the space bar to make the change, and press ctrl-g to quit. If you press ! (exclamation mark) then the search will cease being interactive and take place on all matching text.
If you want to reverse the changes then press M-x (usually ESC followed by x) and type undo and press enter.
Emacs has a rectangular selection mode, see for example: http://emacs-fu.blogspot.com/2008/12/working-with-rectangular-selections.html
Even better, if you enable cua-mode, entering Ctrl-Enter will put you in rectangle selection mode that is very easy to use.
http://trey-jackson.blogspot.com/2008/10/emacs-tip-26-cua-mode-specifically.html
Use a macro !
Go to the first line of the buffer
Start recording a macro (F3)
Move to the beginning of the line (^a)
Search for comma (^s ,)
Transpose (M-t)
Move cursor down one line
Stop recording macro (F4)
Select the rest of the lines and:
M-x apply-macro-to-region-lines
UPDATE: This doesn't work properly if you have multiple words in a column. Looking for a more general solution...