Monday, March 24, 2008

Emacs Tip #15: indent yanked code

I'm a bit apprehensive about this chunk of code, mainly because it facilitates cut/paste coding, which I abhor. Nevertheless, it does come in handy.

When you (shudder) cut/paste code, one of the first things you do is immediately indent the code appropriately. Well, why not have that done automatically for you? This chunk of emacs lisp does the trick rather nicely.

It will not indent regions that are too large (see yank-advised-indent-threshold) and given a prefix argument, it will not indent.


;; automatically indenting yanked text if in programming-modes
(defvar yank-indent-modes '(emacs-lisp-mode
c-mode c++-mode
tcl-mode sql-mode
perl-mode cperl-mode
java-mode jde-mode
lisp-interaction-mode
LaTeX-mode TeX-mode)
"Modes in which to indent regions that are yanked (or yank-popped)")

(defvar yank-advised-indent-threshold 1000
"Threshold (# chars) over which indentation does not automatically occur.")

(defun yank-advised-indent-function (beg end)
"Do indentation, as long as the region isn't too large."
(if (<= (- end beg) yank-advised-indent-threshold)
(indent-region beg end nil)))

(defadvice yank (after yank-indent activate)
"If current mode is one of 'yank-indent-modes, indent yanked text (with prefix arg don't indent)."
(if (and (not (ad-get-arg 0))
(member major-mode yank-indent-modes))
(let ((transient-mark-mode nil))
(yank-advised-indent-function (region-beginning) (region-end)))))

(defadvice yank-pop (after yank-pop-indent activate)
"If current mode is one of 'yank-indent-modes, indent yanked text (with prefix arg don't indent)."
(if (and (not (ad-get-arg 0))
(member major-mode yank-indent-modes))
(let ((transient-mark-mode nil))
(yank-advised-indent-function (region-beginning) (region-end)))))

3 comments:

Max said...

Very nice. But it seems that Yank-pop does not work here. Do not know why.

sofeng said...

Nice blog. I find myself doing a log of cut/copy and pasting of code but it doesn't feel like the Emacs way. What do you do instead?

a said...

Cutting and pasting is evil for many reasons. Unfortunately, there aren't any refactoring tools I know that integrate into Emacs (except Xrefactory - which didn't work well for me).