• Log InLog In
  • Register
Liquid`
Team Liquid Liquipedia
EDT 23:55
CEST 05:55
KST 12:55
  • 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
[ASL22] Ro24 Preview: Siren's Call8[ASL22] Ro24 Preview: Summer's End9Serral wins HomeStory Cup 2915Serral wins Maestros of the Game 244ByuL, and the Limitations of Standard Play3
Community News
Stellar Fest TWO the Moon (Dec 16-20)8Weekly Cups (August 24-30): Patches' balance mod takes over2New 3v3 BGH Ladder (and more) on ShieldBattery!40Weekly Cups (August 17-23): Zerg dominate the week6Weekly Cups (August 10-16): SHIN doubles4
StarCraft 2
General
Weekly Cups (August 10-16): SHIN doubles Nexon wins bid to develop StarCraft IP content, distribute Overwatch mobile game SC4ALL II: SC2 Player Announcement 6/8 - Maru Weekly Cups (August 24-30): Patches' balance mod takes over How would you feel about frequent/monthly balance patches for SC2?
Tourneys
2026 GSTL Announcement Stellar Fest TWO the Moon (Dec 16-20) PIG STY FESTIVAL 8.0! (13 - 23 August) Sparkling Tuna Cup - Weekly Open Tournament IntoTheTV X SOOP SC2 League : Weekly & Monthly
Strategy
[G] Having the right mentality to improve
Custom Maps
Nexus Wars 2021 GUIDE [M] (2) Industrial Park
External Content
Mutation # 541 Binary Choice The PondCast: SC2 News & Results Mutation # 540 Dodge This Mutation # 539 Thunder Dome
Brood War
General
ASL22 General Discussion BGH Auto Balance -> http://bghmmr.eu/ BW General Discussion [Personal Project Share] Terran Defense v0.60 XUN appreciation thread
Tourneys
[Megathread] Daily Proleagues BSL LAN Party - Kraków 29-30 August - OPEN SIGNUPS [ASL22] Ro24 Group F Small VOD Thread 2.0
Strategy
Replay Review Process - What do you do? Game Theory for Starcraft Odyssey Mineral Stack Saturation Fighting Spirit mining rates
Other Games
General Games
[Maplestory Hardcore] Let's Play~!! General RTS Discussion Thread Stratus: Battle for the sky now on steam Early acc Nintendo Switch Thread Stormgate/Frost Giant Megathread
Dota 2
Official 'what is Dota anymore' discussion
League of Legends
[TL LoL EUW IHs] Teemo shall perish TSM pausing esports and CLG Dead
Heroes of the Storm
Heroes of the Storm 2.0
Hearthstone
Deck construction bug
TL Mafia
TL Mafia Power Rank TL Mafia Community Thread NeO.D_StephenKing vs This Guy From 1 Million Dance
Community
General
US Politics Mega-thread Russo-Ukrainian War Thread Things Aren’t Peaceful in Palestine Canadian Politics Mega-thread European Politico-economics QA Mega-thread
Fan Clubs
MarineLorD Fan Club The Creator Fan Club The ShoWTimE Fan Club
Media & Entertainment
Movie Discussion! Anime Discussion Thread
Sports
Football (Soccer) Thread TeamLiquid Health and Fitness Initiative For 2023 MLB/Baseball 2023 NBA General Discussion
World Cup 2022
Tech Support
Computer Build, Upgrade & Buying Resource Thread
TL Community
The Automated Ban List Northern Ireland Global Starcraft
Blogs
Regacy Esports: The Bh…
regacyesports
Violent Games and Crime Rate…
TrAiDoS
LOCKPICKING NOOB
LUCKY_NOOB
Cathedral Of CS And NY pizza a…
FuDDx
Please support my new stand…
Peanutsc
Customize Sidebar...

Website Feedback

Closed Threads



Active: 4397 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
Replay Cast
00:00
2026 GSTL: Main Stage Day 4
CranKy Ducklings170
Discussion
[ Submit Event ]
Live Streams
Refresh
StarCraft 2
RuFF_SC2 207
ViBE120
ProTech115
Nina 16
StarCraft: Brood War
Rain 2557
GuemChi 1877
sSak 87
Noble 19
Dota 2
NeuroSwarm186
LuMiX1
League of Legends
JimRising 711
Counter-Strike
Coldzera 1013
minikerr40
Super Smash Bros
hungrybox109
Mew2King70
Other Games
summit1g5643
XaKoH 341
C9.Mang0143
Sick143
Livibee116
Maynarde107
[ Show 12 non-featured ]
StarCraft 2
• davetesta36
• AfreecaTV YouTube
• intothetv
• Kozan
• IndyKCrew
• Migwel
StarCraft: Brood War
• RayReign 16
• BSLYoutube
• STPLYoutube
• ZZZeroYoutube
League of Legends
• Lourlo1238
Other Games
• Scarra936
Upcoming Events
The PondCast
6h 5m
OSC
18h 35m
IntoTheTV X SOOP
1d 7h
CranKy Ducklings
2 days
Sparkling Tuna Cup
3 days
OSC
3 days
Shopify Rebellion Sundays
3 days
Mixu vs TBD
Spirit vs TBD
Clem vs TBD
Afreeca Starleague
4 days
Soma vs Shuttle
BeSt vs Rush
WardiTV Weekly
4 days
Afreeca Starleague
5 days
Leta vs ggaemo
Jaedong vs Queen
[ Show More ]
GSL
5 days
PiGosaur Cup
5 days
Kung Fu Cup
6 days
Replay Cast
6 days
Liquipedia Results

Completed

Proleague 2026-09-02
PiG Sty Festival 8.0
Light Tournament 2026

Ongoing

KCM Race Survival 2026 Season 3
K-JUNGMAN
ASL Season 22
Super Anchor Qualifying S3
CSL 2026 AUTUMN (S22)
RSL Revival: Season 6
Calamity Invitational
Big Dog Cup 2026 Div 1
BLAST Open Fall 2026
Esports World Cup 2026
Esports World Cup 2026: LCQ
BLAST Bounty Summer 2026
BLAST Bounty Summer Qual
Stake Ranked Episode 3
XSE Pro League 2026
IEM Cologne Major 2026

Upcoming

Acropolis #5
Acropolis #5 - TRS
Escore Tournament S3: King of Kings
Blizzard Classic Cup 2026
Acropolis #5 - GSA
Acropolis #5 - GSB
Acropolis #5 - GSC
HSC XXX
Stellar Fest 2: Lunar Cup
SC4ALL II: StarCraft II
Kung Fu Cup 2026 Grand Finals
RSL Offline Finals
BLAST Rivals Fall 2026
IEM Beijing 2026
Stake Ranked Episode 5
PGL Masters Bucharest 2026
1win Private Club #2
Thunderpick World Champ. '26
ESL Pro League Season 24
Stake Ranked Episode 4
1win Private Club #1
Logitech G Play Connect 2026
SL StarSeries Fall 2026
FISSURE Playground #3
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.