This minor mode allows functions to operate on the current line if they would normally operate on a region and region is currently undefined.
The primary use for this is to kill (cut) the current line if no region is defined, and kill-region is invoked. It basically saves you the effort of going to the begining of the line, selecting the text up to the end of the line, and killing. Similarly, when yanking, it's smart enough to know that the string to be yanked was killed as a whole line, and it should be yanked as one, too. So you don't need to position yourself at the start of the line before yanking. If region is defined, though, all functions act as normal.
This minor mode was originally written by Joe Casadonte in 2001, and
was maintained for recent Emacsen by Steve Purcell for several
years. In 2020 the internals were rewritten to use modern Emacs
features such as filter-buffer-substring-function and
yank-handler, and thereby behave more consistently.
Enabling whole-line-or-region-global-mode causes the common
kill/copy commands to be remapped. When no region is active, if you
type C-w then the current line will be killed. When yanked using
C-y, it will be yanked before the current line. If a region is
active, e.g. if you have selected a word, the commands will behave as
usual.
Other commands are similarly overridden, e.g. comment-dwim: see
whole-line-or-region-local-mode-map for more details.
Using positive numeric prefix arguments, you can operate on multiple
lines at once, e.g. C-3 C-w will kill 3 whole lines, beginning with
the current line. Cycling yanks with yank-pop (M-y) should also
work correctly.
Functions are provided which allow you to easily wrap other commands
so that they will also operate on the current line by default. The
wrapped commands can then similarly be remapped in
whole-line-or-region-local-mode-map.
Ensure whole-line-or-region.el is in a directory on your load-path, and add
the following to your ~/.emacs or ~/.emacs.d/init.el:
(require 'whole-line-or-region)If you're an Emacs 24 user or you have a recent version of
package.el you can install whole-line-or-region from the
MELPA repository. The version of
whole-line-or-region there will always be up-to-date.
Author: Steve Purcell
Homepage: https://github.com/purcell/whole-line-or-region
