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.

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, <S-home>), 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 M-x mwim-beginning and M-x mwim-end commands, that allow you to switch between any positions you want. By default, they do the same as mwim-beginning-of-code-or-line-or-comment and mwim-end-of-code-or-line, however you can configure switching positions for these commands with mwim-beginning-position-functions and mwim-end-position-functions variables.

And if you wish to use a single key to switch between all these positions, you can use mwim command.

The position functions from the mentioned variables 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.