• Log InLog In
  • Register
Liquid`
Team Liquid Liquipedia
EDT 16:13
CEST 22:13
KST 05:13
  • Home
  • Forum
  • Calendar
  • Streams
  • Liquipedia
  • Features
  • Store
  • EPT
  • TL+
  • StarCraft 2
  • Brood War
  • Smash
  • Heroes
  • Counter-Strike
  • Overwatch
  • Liquibet
  • Fantasy StarCraft
  • TLPD
  • StarCraft 2
  • Brood War
  • Blogs
Forum Sidebar
Events/Features
News
Featured News
[ASL21] Ro24 Preview Pt2: News Flash10[ASL21] Ro24 Preview Pt1: New Chaos0Team Liquid Map Contest #22 - Presented by Monster Energy18ByuL: The Forgotten Master of ZvT30Behind the Blue - Team Liquid History Book20
Community News
Weekly Cups (March 23-29): herO takes triple6Aligulac acquired by REPLAYMAN.com/Stego Research8Weekly Cups (March 16-22): herO doubles, Cure surprises3Blizzard Classic Cup @ BlizzCon 2026 - $100k prize pool51Weekly Cups (March 9-15): herO, Clem, ByuN win4
StarCraft 2
General
Team Liquid Map Contest #22 - Presented by Monster Energy Blizzard Classic Cup @ BlizzCon 2026 - $100k prize pool What mix of new & old maps do you want in the next ladder pool? (SC2) Aligulac acquired by REPLAYMAN.com/Stego Research Weekly Cups (March 23-29): herO takes triple
Tourneys
RSL Season 4 announced for March-April Sparkling Tuna Cup - Weekly Open Tournament StarCraft Evolution League (SC Evo Biweekly) WardiTV Mondays World University TeamLeague (500$+) | Signups Open
Strategy
Custom Maps
[M] (2) Frigid Storage Publishing has been re-enabled! [Feb 24th 2026]
External Content
The PondCast: SC2 News & Results Mutation # 520 Moving Fees Mutation # 519 Inner Power Mutation # 518 Radiation Zone
Brood War
General
so ive been playing broodwar for a week straight. Klaucher discontinued / in-game color settings BGH Auto Balance -> http://bghmmr.eu/ Pros React To: JaeDong vs Queen [ASL21] Ro24 Preview Pt2: News Flash
Tourneys
[Megathread] Daily Proleagues [ASL21] Ro24 Group E [ASL21] Ro24 Group F Azhi's Colosseum - Foreign KCM
Strategy
What's the deal with APM & what's its true value Fighting Spirit mining rates Simple Questions, Simple Answers
Other Games
General Games
Starcraft Tabletop Miniature Game Nintendo Switch Thread Stormgate/Frost Giant Megathread General RTS Discussion Thread Darkest Dungeon
Dota 2
The Story of Wings Gaming Official 'what is Dota anymore' discussion
League of Legends
G2 just beat GenG in First stand
Heroes of the Storm
Simple Questions, Simple Answers Heroes of the Storm 2.0
Hearthstone
Deck construction bug Heroes of StarCraft mini-set
TL Mafia
Mafia Game Mode Feedback/Ideas TL Mafia Community Thread Five o'clock TL Mafia
Community
General
The Chess Thread US Politics Mega-thread Russo-Ukrainian War Thread NASA and the Private Sector Things Aren’t Peaceful in Palestine
Fan Clubs
The IdrA Fan Club
Media & Entertainment
[Req][Books] Good Fantasy/SciFi books [Manga] One Piece Movie Discussion!
Sports
2024 - 2026 Football Thread Formula 1 Discussion Cricket [SPORT] Tokyo Olympics 2021 Thread General nutrition recommendations
World Cup 2022
Tech Support
[G] How to Block Livestream Ads
TL Community
The Automated Ban List
Blogs
China Uses Video Games to Sh…
TrAiDoS
Funny Nicknames
LUCKY_NOOB
Iranian anarchists: organize…
XenOsky
FS++
Kraekkling
Shocked by a laser…
Spydermine0240
ASL S21 English Commentary…
namkraft
Electronics
mantequilla
Customize Sidebar...

Website Feedback

Closed Threads



Active: 1654 users

More emacs VAssisting

Blogs > araav
Post a Reply
araav
Profile Blog Joined September 2004
Armenia1590 Posts
April 22 2009 14:47 GMT
#1
Yay, added three more Visual Assist features to my emacs. Two of them are not exactly what i wanted, but still better, much better than nothing.

This emacs thingie is really-really growing on me, its coolness and richeness are amazing!

Ok, about the added features.

Ctrl+Shift+V
This key combination pops a menu of last copied texts so you select one quickly and it's inserted. And this pasted chunk comes on top of copied things. When I started using Assist, this, along with Alt+o and Alt+m feature quickly became my top used features. I was so missing those.

After successfully implementing the Alt+o thing, I was constantly thinking about this one. I am very new in Emacs and I know those are easy things, but not for me.

Emacs has something similar to this paste menu, called "Paste from kill menu" in the "Edit" menu. But you know, when typing, it's not convenient to reach to mouse or press menu key combinations, it must be Ctrl+Shift+V, ok? How do I add new things for emacs? I do M-x ielm and the wanderful elisp interpreter appears. Her I can do whatever I want and at the end, when everything works, I just copy and paste to my .emacs.

First thing, after some trial and error, I got
(global-set-key [?\C-\S-v] 'do-paste-menu)
key combination to set up the keys to be calling the do-paste-menu function. Among some errors was that [?\C-V] was overriding the C+v too.

now my (defun do-paste-menu() ( print "hello" )) was printing my usual hello and it was already cool :-)
Next, I found from emcas include files that there was somthing called x-popup-menu. After reading its info it turned that this cool function was all I needed. Now
(defun do-paste-menu() ( let ((y (x-popup-menu t 'yank-menu))) (print y)))
was popping up the menu - my dream menu, but when I pressed it, nothing happened. Actually the content of the selected thing was prineted in the echo area. Not bad at all, but the quick replacement of 9print y) by (insert y) was inserting a lot of attributes along with the actual text. So I gave up at the moment and returned to it a couple of days later.
Long story short, my final function looks like this:
(defun do-paste-menu()
"Show and paste from menu"
(interactive)
(let* ((y (x-popup-menu t 'yank-menu)) (z (car y)))
(when (and z (> (length z) 0))
(set-text-properties 0 (length z) nil z)
(insert z))))

As it turned out, not y, but the car of y was holding the actual text and I stored it in z. And then if (when) there was anything there (the z part of and) and it it had a length of >0, then I removed its properties (set-text-properties 0 (length z) nil z) and inserted it! And voila! My ctrl+shift+v works!!!!!!!!!! Well, not exactly. In the ideal world it should also pop the pasted text and amke it my currently pasted guy and the list also contains duplicated texts, so there is still someting to work on. Will do that eventually.
The next thing, I know I did it all wrong, the menu item itself (the y guy) seems contains the actual pasting function too (emacs coolness), but I need to read up some stuff before being able to use it.

As for now, I already have the C+S+v's preliminary implementation and I am happy enough.

Alt+m
This again is one of my most favorite featrues of Visual assist. You press alt+m, the list of functions appears of an editable combo box, you then type in some letters and it selects the function from that combo box. It's so quick and easy, after some time you do not even remember the sequence of the functions. Not only you forget it, you don't even think about it, it becomes abstracted. Now one needs to be careful with this though. Indeed if you just type in functions regardless of their places, that would fuck up the structure of the object file and in some cases even the program's performance (this is quiet an advanced topic, so will not touch for now, go read some Drepper papers for that).
Back to the emacs. Apparently emacs' speedbar is a nice feature and it parses and dynamically updates the list of functions. But again... it's interface for this particular use case is too complcated. You need to
- switch to it (alt+zero for me)
- press +
- find your function
- press enter

As a result the list remains opened and a valuable vertical space is wasted. Though speedbar's added green overlay on top of the just visited function is sweet.

It turned out emacs already has a nice way of doing this and it's called imenu. Speedbar internally uses imenu's features to construct its items. Imenu has a feature of adding a menu item "Index" to the main menu, the contents of which is what I want. Imenu also offers a way of showing a menu for the M-x imenu command. It can have three values - Mouse event, Always, Never.
If it's bound to a mouse event, a menu is indeed appears. I want keyboard, so I selected "Always". It didn't work... what a pity. Again, I ended up with the following code -
;; go-to-definition-menu
(defun my-imenu-helper()
(let (index-alist
(result t)
alist)
;; Create a list for this buffer only when needed.
(while (eq result t)
(setq index-alist (imenu--make-index-alist))
(setq result (imenu--mouse-menu index-alist t))
(and (equal result imenu--rescan-item)
(imenu--cleanup)
(setq result t imenu--index-alist nil)))
result))

(defun my-imenu() (interactive) (imenu (my-imenu-helper)))
(global-set-key [?\M-\m] 'my-imenu)

The function my-imenu-handler was taken from imenu's codes and modified to meet my needs. The original function was bound to use mouse event which made it unusable as it was. So its modified coppy appears in my .emacs. The (imenu ....) call does the goto part to the place which the handler returns.

This works, I press Alt+M and the menu appears. This is good again, but it's again not what I really wanted. I want to have the filtering method - I want a combo box solution!

Alt+g
Or open the include file!
If you do Alt+g on line
#include "myfile.h"
and your cursor is somewhere between the "", visual assist opens the myfile.h. This again is a nice feature, which cuts a lot of speedbar usage.

After some ielming, I got the following code working for me:
(defun hoper-src(env) (let ((p (getenv env))) (if p (concat (file-name-as-directory p) "hoper/src") nil)))
(defun src-path () (list "." (hoper-src "LOCAL_BUILD") (hoper-src "GLOBAL_BUILD")))
(defun line-incl-fln(str) (when (string-match "^[[:space]*#[[:space]*include[[:space]+[\"\<]\\(.*\\)[\"\>][[:space]*$" str)
(match-string-no-properties 1 str)))
(defun incl-fln() (line-incl-fln (thing-at-point 'line)))
(defun open-incl-fln(str) (let ((fln (locate-file str (src-path)))) (find-file fln)))
(defun open-include-file()
"Open the C/C++ include file under cursor"
(interactive)
(let ((fln (incl-fln))) (when fln (open-incl-fln fln))))
(global-set-key [M-\kp-multiply] 'open-include-file)
(global-set-key [M-\kp-decimal] 'open-include-file)

Some things to mention.
(src-path) returns the list of directories to search for a file. It always includes the current directory and also I've added the directories for my company's project, which I mention as "hoper" (intentional change).
The funtion line-incl-fln parses the argument of form #include "file" or and returns the FILE part (well, it also accepts "file> and &lt file", but it's a feature, not a bug [while blogger.com's complaining about my &ltfile incomplete key and eating it through the end of line is indeed a bug - wtf]).
The rest is just taking the current line (thing-at-point 'line), and searching it through find-file.
I could not bind it to Alt+g, so I went with both Alt+Keypad * and Alt+"Keypad .". The . one is similar to the default Alt+. aka goto definition and the * one is similar to goto current line of the visual studio debugger. Although totally different, but somehow it looked at least familiar for me.

Off now, will continue later...

The flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of all.
Please log in or register to reply.
Live Events Refresh
BSL
19:00
S22 - Open Qualifier #6
ZZZero.O72
LiquipediaDiscussion
[ Submit Event ]
Live Streams
Refresh
StarCraft 2
mouzHeroMarine 544
elazer 330
IndyStarCraft 240
Hui .113
StarCraft: Brood War
Britney 15974
Mini 600
Larva 355
Dewaltoss 127
ZZZero.O 72
IntoTheRainbow 18
HiyA 10
Dota 2
canceldota116
capcasts99
League of Legends
JimRising 91
Counter-Strike
olofmeister17527
tarik_tv2028
byalli1587
Heroes of the Storm
Liquid`Hasu362
Khaldor247
Other Games
summit1g9060
Grubby3519
FrodaN2141
fl0m944
B2W.Neo791
mouzStarbuck273
ArmadaUGS117
Trikslyr47
Railgan9
Organizations
Other Games
gamesdonequick1429
StarCraft 2
angryscii 38
Blizzard YouTube
StarCraft: Brood War
BSLTrovo
sctven
[ Show 15 non-featured ]
StarCraft 2
• Response 3
• AfreecaTV YouTube
• intothetv
• Kozan
• IndyKCrew
• LaughNgamezSOOP
• Migwel
• sooper7s
StarCraft: Brood War
• RayReign 20
• BSLYoutube
• STPLYoutube
• ZZZeroYoutube
League of Legends
• Doublelift1549
Other Games
• Shiphtur186
• tFFMrPink 18
Upcoming Events
Afreeca Starleague
13h 47m
Wardi Open
13h 47m
Replay Cast
1d 3h
Sparkling Tuna Cup
1d 13h
Kung Fu Cup
2 days
The PondCast
3 days
Replay Cast
4 days
Replay Cast
5 days
CranKy Ducklings
5 days
BSL
5 days
[ Show More ]
Replay Cast
6 days
Sparkling Tuna Cup
6 days
BSL
6 days
Liquipedia Results

Completed

Escore Tournament S2: W1
WardiTV Winter 2026
NationLESS Cup

Ongoing

BSL Season 22
CSL Elite League 2026
ASL Season 21
CSL Season 20: Qualifier 2
StarCraft2 Community Team League 2026 Spring
Nations Cup 2026
PGL Bucharest 2026
Stake Ranked Episode 1
BLAST Open Spring 2026
ESL Pro League S23 Finals
ESL Pro League S23 Stage 1&2
PGL Cluj-Napoca 2026
IEM Kraków 2026
BLAST Bounty Winter 2026

Upcoming

CSL 2026 SPRING (S20)
Escore Tournament S2: W2
IPSL Spring 2026
Escore Tournament S2: W3
Acropolis #4
BSL 22 Non-Korean Championship
CSLAN 4
Kung Fu Cup 2026 Grand Finals
HSC XXIX
uThermal 2v2 2026 Main Event
RSL Revival: Season 5
IEM Cologne Major 2026
Stake Ranked Episode 2
CS Asia Championships 2026
Asian Champions League 2026
IEM Atlanta 2026
PGL Astana 2026
BLAST Rivals Spring 2026
CCT Season 3 Global Finals
IEM Rio 2026
TLPD

1. ByuN
2. TY
3. Dark
4. Solar
5. Stats
6. Nerchio
7. sOs
8. soO
9. INnoVation
10. Elazer
1. Rain
2. Flash
3. EffOrt
4. Last
5. Bisu
6. Soulkey
7. Mini
8. Sharp
Sidebar Settings...

Advertising | Privacy Policy | Terms Of Use | Contact Us

Original banner artwork: Jim Warren
The contents of this webpage are copyright © 2026 TLnet. All Rights Reserved.