I often want to make a multiline function call and reduce it down to one line. For example, convert...
function_call(
'first_arg',
'second')
to
function_call('first_arg', 'second')
Does emacs have some commands to help with this. Specifically, is there a command that will delete all whitespace from the point to the first non-whitespace character?
You might try delete-indentation, my favorite command for joining multiple lines into one line. In your example, put the cursor on the line with "second" and hit M-^ twice. Here are the docs:
M-^ runs the command delete-indentation, which is an interactive compiled Lisp function in simple.el.
It is bound to M-^.
(delete-indentation &optional arg)
Join this line to previous and fix up whitespace at join. If there is a fill prefix, delete it from the beginning of this line. With argument, join this line to following line.
Take a look at the fixup-whitespace function. It comes with Emacs, in simple.el. Its docs are:
Fixup white space between objects around point.
Leave one space or none, according to the context.
A similar function, just-one-space, that
Deletes all spaces and tabs around point, leaving one space
is typically bound to M-SPC.
Specifically, is there a command that will delete all whitespace from the point to the first non-whitespace character?
There's a command that does almost that:
M-\ runs the command delete-horizontal-space
which is an interactive compiled Lisp function in `simple.el'.
It is bound to M-\.
(delete-horizontal-space &optional backward-only)
Delete all spaces and tabs around point.
If backward-only is non-nil, only delete them before point.
You can always use M-z to delete upto a character.
For eg in your case:
M-z ' to delete upto the single quote (unfortunately this will delete the single quote as well, but that is a minor inconvenience).
I use the following macro to "pull" the next line onto the end of the current line, compressing whitespace.
(defun pull-next-line()
(interactive)
(move-end-of-line 1)
(kill-line)
(just-one-space))
This is exactly the opposite of #jrockway's move-line-up and of delete-indentation, which I find more natural. The just-one-space command in the macro is exactly #Mike's M-SPACE.
I bind pull-next-line to M-J (in analogy with Vim's J, for "join", command) using the following in my .emacs.
(global-set-key (kbd "M-J") 'pull-next-line)
Example. Calling pull-next-line on the first line of
function_call(
'first_arg',
'second')
yields
function_call( 'first_arg',
'second')
Calling it a second time yields
function_call( 'first_arg', 'second')
Alt-space will reduce a string of whitespace to a single space character, but it won't delete the newline. Still, that should help a little.
To delete everything from point to the first non-whitespace (or newline), type a non-whitespace char, Alt-space, backspace (to remove final whitespace char), then backspace (to delete the char you added.
To turn the multi-line function declaration into a single-line declaration, use a combination of Alt-space, backspace, and Alt-E (goto-endofline) commands.
A rather drastic way of doing this is Hungry-Delete mode:
Hungry-Delete is a minor-mode that causes deletion to delete all whitespace in the direction you are deleting.
A slightly different approach would be creating a keyboard macro to do the job for you.
so, for creating the macro stage a general scenario like so:
foo
bar
[a line with "foo" then a couple of lines later and with some white spaces, write "bar"]
then standing anywhere between foo and bar, do the following:
C-x ( ; start recording macro
M-b ; move backwards to the beginning of foo
END ; move to the end of foo
C-space ; place mark
C-M-f ; move to the end of bar
HOME ; move to the beginning of the line
C-w ; yank out all the white space
M-SPACE ; leave only one space
C-x ) ; end recording the macro
M-x name-last-kbd-macro ; name it, call it jline or something
Now you can always remove all whitespace between two words with M-x one-line
Make sure you remember to save your keyboard macro by issuing M-x insert-kbd-macro somewhere in your .emacs file - this is how it looks:
(fset 'jline
[?\M-b end ?\C- ?\C-\M-f home ?\C-w escape ? ])
I do this:
(defun move-line-up ()
"Removes leading spaces from the current line, and then moves
the current line to the end of the previous line."
(interactive)
(let (start end)
(save-excursion
(beginning-of-line)
; get first non-space character, only look on this line
(let ((search-end (save-excursion (end-of-line) (point))))
(re-search-forward "[^[:space:]]" search-end))
(setq end (1- (point)))
(previous-line)
(end-of-line)
(setq start (point))
(delete-region start end))
(goto-char start)))
(defun move-next-line-up ()
"Moves the next line to the end of the current line"
(interactive)
(next-line)
(move-line-up))
And bind these as:
(global-set-key (kbd "C-x ,") 'move-line-up)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-x .") 'move-next-line-up)
So to solve your problem, on the line that says "second)", just run C-x , C-x ,
If you want all of your deletes to act that way, you might check out greedy-delete.
Related
I have the following code that attempts to create a new line and then jump to it. The idea is that move-end-of-line will jump to the end of the current line, and ["C-m"] would act as return/enter. Yet executing this command gives the error: "wrong number of arguments". How do I fix this?
(global-set-key (kbd "C-.") 'new-line)
(defun new-line ()
(interactive)
(move-end-of-line)
["C-m"]
)
I think you need to read the Emacs & elisp manuals: these questions are pretty easy to answer. Here's one way to do it.
(defun insert-line-after-line (&optional n)
(interactive "p")
(end-of-line 1) ;end of current line
(open-line n) ;open n new lines
(forward-line 1)) ;go to start of first of them
But seriously: Emacs has very extensive self-documentation, it is easy to find out how to do these things.
An option is to record a macro and use that.
M-x kmacro-start-macro
C-e
C-m
M-x kmacro-end-macro
If you don't care about the macro persisting, just run it:
C-x e
But if you want it to persist you would save it:
M-x name-last-kbd-macro new-line
M-x insert-kbd-macro new-line
and paste the output into your initialisation file (with your shortcut definition):
(global-set-key (kbd "C-.") 'new-line)
(fset 'new-line
[end return])
["C-m"] is like the way you specify a key for doing a key binding, but this is not the same as how you programmatically tell Emacs to insert a character into a document. You could use (insert-char ?\^M) (see ref here), but that would result in a literal ^M character (try it; another way to do the same thing interactively is Ctrl-Q followed by Ctrl-M). (insert "\n") seems to be what you're looking for.
Also, the reason you're getting the message "wrong number of arguments" is because (move-end-of-line) requires an argument when called out of interactive context. (move-end-of-line 1) works.
That said, possibly an easier way to achieve the result you're looking for is with the following setting:
(setq next-line-add-newlines t)
This will allow you to just do C-n at the end of the file and not worry about the distinction between moving and inserting.
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.
C-a brings me back to the beginning of the line. But I would like C-a to bring me back to the beginning of the text when writing python code.
if(test) :
print 'this is a test' # here i want to C-a
Now, at the end of the line starting with print i would like to press C-a to go to the p of print, not to the beginning of the line. Which function does this in emacs?
infact there is a direct global key binding for this M-m
There is 'misc-cmds.el' by Drew Adams which has the command beginning-or-indentation. It's probably what you are looking for. From the docstring:
Move cursor to beginning of this line or to its indentation.
If at indentation position of this line, move to beginning of line.
If at beginning of line, move to beginning of previous line.
Else, move to indentation position of this line.
Find it at http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/misc-cmds.el.
I use
back-to-indentation
I bound it to C-x C-a in my .emacs:
(global-set-key "\C-x\C-a" 'back-to-indentation)
I made a small custom function to do this in my setup. When I press C-a and it's not at the indentation, it goes back to the indentation. If it is, it goes to the beginning of the line.
;; Remap C-a to more useful behaviour (a press anywhere other than at the indentation preforms the effect of back-to-indetation, otherwise, the normal C-a behaviour is used.
(global-set-key (kbd "C-a") (lambda () (interactive)
(let ((previous-point (point)))
(back-to-indentation)
(if (equal (point) previous-point) (move-beginning-of-line 1)))))
Is there an Emacs function to delete (forward or backwards) until the first whitespace? For example, I have the following line, and the cursor is marked by the caret:
someword ?(&)!* morewords
^
I want to delete the backwards the sequence of non-alphanumeric characters, but not the word someword. Using backward-delete-word will wipe out the word as well. The same is with the cursor before the weird characters and kill-word.
emacs has the function zap-to-char which will delete everything up to a specific character. So, this won't work for all whitespace but if your specific problem is everything up to a space you can use this function. Give the function a negative argument to zap backwards.
I don't know of any function, but it's easy enough to make one:
(defun my-delete-backward-to-ws ()
(interactive)
(delete-region (point) (save-excursion (skip-syntax-backward "^ ") (point))))
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?