By: Eric Ihli
View the final code and other resources in the GitHub repo.
This is an Emacs major-mode for literate programming in srcweave, written as a literate program using srcweave.
This will be a bit of a rehash of ModeTutorial from the Emacs Wiki. Thanks to Scott Andrew Borton for that tutorial.
- Srcweave Literate Mode
- Hooks
- Keymap
- Autoload
- Syntax highlighting
- Single " turning on highlighting
- Indentation
- Editing a code block
- The entry function
- Preamble
Note: This tutorial is a literate program. This means you are reading the source code right now! Each piece of code will be shown and explained thoroughly, so you can be sure nothing is left out. The final code was created by "tangling" the blocks of code together.
First, we define some variables that all modes should define. ‘lit-mode-hook’ allows the user to run their own code when your mode is run.
Now we create a keymap. This map, here called ‘lit-mode-map’, allows both you and users to define their own keymaps. The keymap is immediately set to a default keymap. Then, using ‘define-key’, we insert an example keybinding into the keymap, which maps the ‘newline-and-indent’ function to Control-j (which is actually the default binding for this function, but is included anyway as an example). Of course, you may define as many keybindings as you wish. If your keymap will have very few entries, then you may want to consider ‘make-sparse-keymap’ rather than ‘make-keymap’.
(defvar lit-mode-map
(let ((map (make-keymap)))
@{Keybindings}
map)
"Keymap for Srcweave Literate major mode.")
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(define-key map (kbd "C-j") 'newline-and-indent)
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Here, we append a definition to ‘auto-mode-alist’. This tells emacs that when a buffer with a name ending with .wpd is opened, then wpdl-mode should be started in that buffer. Some modes leave this step to the user.
Next let's define a minimal set of keywords for emacs to highlight. A ‘font-lock-keyword’ variable is a list of keywords to highlight. There are many ways to specify this list. I'll use the form (matcher . facename). With this form, I'll specify a pattern to match, and then a face name to use for the actual highlighting.
(defconst lit-font-lock-code-blocks
(list
'("^\\(---\\)". font-lock-doc-markup-face)
'("^---[\t ]*\\([^\-\n/]+\\)" . (1 font-lock-constant-face))
'("@{\\([^}]+\\)}" . (1 font-lock-constant-face)))
"Minimal highlighting expressions for lit mode.")
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There are three elements to my list: the first element matches srcweave code block syntax, `---`. The second element matches the declaration of the reference name (the name used to include the contents of one source code block into another). And the third matches the _use_ of the reference name (e.g. `@{SomeCodeBlock}`). I'm going to borrow some existing faces with names close-enough to what I want. For the open and close of a code block, I'm going to use `font-lock-doc-markup-face`. For the code block reference names, I'll use `font-lock-constant-face`. For my keyword list, I’ve selected those WPDL keywords which would benefit most from being highlighted: keywords that delimit blocks of information. One may notice that the regexp used to specify these keywords is optimized. I did not have to do this by hand. Emacs provides the ‘regexp-opt’ function to save you from the tedious work of creating complicated regexps. ‘regexp-opt’ takes a list of strings and an additional optional argument. This optional argument controls whether or not we want to wrap the entire regexp in parens. In our case, we do. For example, the following expression:
This is best demonstrated with an image. It's hard to know when a `"` should be the start of a string that we want to highlight and when it's just a lone character that shouldn't turn on highlighting. I'm finding it nicer to just have it turned off. It wasn't easy to find. (defvar font-lock-keywords-only nil "Non-nil means Font Lock should not fontify comments or strings. This is normally set via `font-lock-defaults'.") Although this is technically a syntax highlighting topic, I'll put this in lit-mode-hooks so it will run when the mode is activated.
Indentation is very fundamental. I'm going to default to tabs for indentation.
(add-hook 'lit-mode-hook
(lambda ()
@{lit-mode-hooks}
(setq indent-tabs-mode t)
(setq indent-tabs-function #'tab-to-tab-stop)
(setq indent-line-function #'indent-to-left-margin)
(setq display-line-numbers-mode t)
(setq tab-width 4)))
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I want to be able to take advantage of major modes for whatever language I'm working with. Language-specific major modes are especially nice for things like formatting and alignment. This gives us syntax highlighting but gives us errors from LSP. https://emacs-lsp.github.io/lsp-mode/manual-language-docs/lsp-org/
(defvar lit-mode-code-block-mode 'emacs-lisp-mode)
(defvar lit-mode-saved-mode nil)
(defun lit-mode-widen-advice ()
(funcall (symbol-function lit-mode-saved-mode))
(setq lit-mode-saved-mode nil)
(advice-remove 'widen #'lit-mode-widen-advice))
(defun lit-mode-narrow-to-code-block-for-editing ()
(interactive)
(let ((beg)
(end))
(setq lit-mode-saved-mode major-mode)
(advice-add 'widen :after #'lit-mode-widen-advice)
(save-excursion
(search-backward-regexp "^--- ")
(next-line)
(beginning-of-line)
(setq beg (point))
(search-forward-regexp "^---$")
(previous-line)
(end-of-line)
(setq end (point))
(narrow-to-region beg end)
(funcall lit-mode-code-block-mode))))
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Narrowing a buffer makes it _look_ like you're only operating on a small section of a buffer. But any buffer configuration, like the mode line, operate on the entire buffer even if you can't see the entire buffer in your window. This becomes a problem if you narrow to a region of C code and then turn on c-mode. The mode will complain because the buffer isn't valid C. Emacs offers a `clone-indirect` that creates a copy of a buffer and changes made to one buffer get reflected in the other. But in hindsight. That doesn't work either. https://github.com/aaronbieber/fence-edit.el/blob/master/fence-edit.el
(defvar lit-mode-code-block-mode 'c-mode)
(defmacro with-indirect-buffer (beg end &rest body)
(let ((saved-mode major-mode))
`(with-current-buffer (clone-indirect-buffer nil nil)
(narrow-to-region beg end)
(funcall lit-mode-code-block-mode)
(unwind-protect
,body
(kill-buffer (current-buffer))))))
(defun lit-mode-points-surrounding-code-block ()
(save-excursion
(let ((beg)
(end))
(search-backward-regexp "^--- ")
(next-line)
(beginning-of-line)
(setq beg (point))
(search-forward-regexp "^---$")
(previous-line)
(end-of-line)
(setq end (point))
(cl-values beg end))))
(defun lit-mode-edit-region-in-mode ()
(interactive "@r")
(let ((new-buffer (clone-indirect-buffer nil t)))
(cl-multiple-value-bind (beg end) (lit-mode-points-surrounding-code-block)
(narrow-to-region beg end)
(funcall lit-mode-code-block-mode))))
(define-key map (kbd "C-;") #'lit-mode-narrow-to-code-block-for-editing)
Finally, we will create the function that will be called by Emacs when the mode is started.
(defun lit-mode ()
"Major mode for editing srcweave literate files."
(interactive)
(kill-all-local-variables)
(use-local-map lit-mode-map)
(set (make-local-variable 'font-lock-defaults) '(lit-font-lock-code-blocks))
(setq major-mode 'lit-mode)
(setq mode-name "Lit")
(run-hooks 'lit-mode-hook))
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@{Preamble}
@{Hooks}
@{Keymap}
@{Autoload}
@{Syntax highlighting}
@{Indentation}
@{Editing a code block}
@{Entry function}
(provide 'lit-mode)
@{Postamble}
advice-add requires a minimum Emacs version of 24.4, so we set that in
the preamble.
;;; lit-mode.el --- Description -*- lexical-binding: t; -*-
;;
;; Copyright (C) 2022 Eric Ihli
;;
;; Author: Eric Ihli <eihli@owoga.com>
;; Maintainer: Eric Ihli <eihli@owoga.com>
;; Created: August 02, 2022
;; Modified: August 02, 2022
;; Version: 0.0.1
;; Keywords: abbrev bib c calendar comm convenience data docs emulations extensions faces files frames games hardware help hypermedia i18n internal languages lisp local maint mail matching mouse multimedia news outlines processes terminals tex tools unix vc wp
;; Homepage: https://github.com/eihli/lit-mode
;; Package-Requires: ((emacs "24.4"))
;;
;; This file is not part of GNU Emacs.
;;
;;; Commentary:
;;
;; Description
;;
;;; Code:
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