26.11 Other Features Useful for Editing Programs

Some Emacs commands that aren’t designed specifically for editing programs are useful for that nonetheless.

The Emacs commands that operate on words, sentences and paragraphs are useful for editing code. Most symbol names contain words (see Words), while sentences can be found in strings and comments (see Sentences). As for paragraphs, they are defined in most programming language modes to begin and end at blank lines (see Paragraphs). Therefore, judicious use of blank lines to make the program clearer will also provide useful chunks of text for the paragraph commands to work on. Auto Fill mode, if enabled in a programming language major mode, indents the new lines which it creates.

Superword mode is a buffer-local minor mode that causes editing and motion commands to treat symbols (e.g., ‘this_is_a_symbol’) as words. When Superword mode is enabled, the minor mode indicator ‘²’ appears in the mode line. See also the similar subword-mode (see MixedCase Words).

Electric Layout mode (M-x electric-layout-mode) is a global minor mode that automatically inserts newlines when you type certain characters; for example, ‘{’, ‘}’ and ‘;’ in Javascript mode.

Apart from Hideshow mode (see Hideshow), another way to selectively display parts of a program is to use the selective display feature (see Selective Display). Programming modes often also support Outline minor mode (see Outline Mode), which can be used with the Foldout package (see Foldout).

Prettify Symbols mode is a buffer-local minor mode that replaces certain strings with more attractive versions for display purposes. For example, in Emacs Lisp mode, it replaces the string ‘lambda’ with the Greek lambda character ‘λ’. In a TeX buffer, it will replace ‘\alpha’ … ‘\omega’ and other math macros with their Unicode characters. You may wish to use this in non-programming modes as well. You can customize the mode by adding more entries to prettify-symbols-alist. More elaborate customization is available via customizing prettify-symbols-compose-predicate if its default value prettify-symbols-default-compose-p is not appropriate. There is also a global version, global-prettify-symbols-mode, which enables the mode in all buffers that support it.

The symbol at point can be shown in its original form. This is controlled by the variable prettify-symbols-unprettify-at-point: if non-nil, the original form of symbol at point will be restored for as long as point is at it.