emacs-mwim

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About

This Emacs package provides several commands to switch between various line positions, like moving to the beginning/end of code, line or comment. It is inspired by this EmacsWiki page (some code from this page is used). mwim stands for Move Where I Mean.

Quick start

If you don't have a wish to read all the text written below, just try the following key bindings and see what happens:

(global-set-key (kbd "C-a") 'mwim-beginning)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-e") 'mwim-end)

Installation

Automatic

This package can be installed from MELPA (with M-x package-install or =M-x list-packages=).

Manual

For the manual installation, clone the repo, add the directory to =load-path= and add autoloads for the commands you need:

(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/mwim-dir")
(autoload 'mwim "mwim" nil t)
(autoload 'mwim-beginning "mwim" nil t)
(autoload 'mwim-end "mwim" nil t)
(autoload 'mwim-beginning-of-code-or-line "mwim" nil t)
(autoload 'mwim-beginning-of-line-or-code "mwim" nil t)
(autoload 'mwim-beginning-of-code-or-line-or-comment "mwim" nil t)
(autoload 'mwim-end-of-code-or-line "mwim" nil t)
(autoload 'mwim-end-of-line-or-code "mwim" nil t)

Usage

Simple commands

As you can see in the gif demonstration:

• M-x mwim-beginning-of-code-or-line moves the point between a first
non-space character and a first character of the line.

• M-x mwim-end-of-code-or-line moves the point between the end of code
(not counting a trailing comment) and the end of the line.

M-x mwim-beginning-of-line-or-code and =M-x mwim-end-of-line-or-code= do the same but in a reverse order.

Also there is M-x mwim-beginning-of-code-or-line-or-comment command that switches the point between these 3 positions.

You may bind some keys to some of those commands in a usual manner, for example:

(global-set-key (kbd "C-a") 'mwim-beginning-of-code-or-line)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-e") 'mwim-end-of-code-or-line)
(global-set-key (kbd "<home>") 'mwim-beginning-of-line-or-code)
(global-set-key (kbd "<end>") 'mwim-end-of-line-or-code)

Note that shift-selection is supported by all MWIM commands, which means if you press Shift with the bound keys (for example, ==), the region of text will be selected (see Emacs manual for details).

Move where you really want

Along with the described simple commands, there are more general commands that allow you to switch between any positions you want:

• M-x mwim-beginning
• M-x mwim-end
• M-x mwim

You can configure switching positions for these commands with =mwim-beginning-position-functions=, mwim-end-position-functions and =mwim-position-functions= variables.

The position functions from these variables are called without arguments and they should return a new point position. For example, after:

(setq mwim-beginning-position-functions
      (list (lambda () (+ 2 (line-beginning-position)))
            'mwim-code-beginning))

M-x mwim-beginning will switch between the third character (the second counting from 0) on the current line and the code beginning position.

You can also make mode-specific positions by making these variables local. Let's say, for emacs-lisp-mode, you want a usual switch between the code end and line end when you call =M-x mwim-end=; but if there is a comment on the current line, you want to move to the beginning of this comment instead of the code end position. You can do it like this:

(defun my/comment-beginning-or-code-end ()
  (or (mwim-line-comment-beginning)
      (mwim-code-end)))

(defun my/setup-elisp-mwim-positions ()
  (setq-local mwim-end-position-functions
              '(my/comment-beginning-or-code-end
                mwim-line-end)))

(add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode-hook 'my/setup-elisp-mwim-positions)

So, if you want to use these commands instead of the Emacs defaults, you can bind them like this:

(global-set-key (kbd "<C-tab>") #'mwim)
(global-set-key [remap move-beginning-of-line] #'mwim-beginning)
(global-set-key [remap move-end-of-line] #'mwim-end)

Define your own commands

Finally, you can define your own commands using =mwim-move-to-next-position= macro. See the code of mwim, =mwim-beginning= or mwim-end commands for examples.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Adam Porter, who wrote mosey.el package, which provides similar facilities as mwim.el. Several ideas were taken from it.