Tweaking Emacs' Text Indent: Don't Indent So Aggressively (Shallow Thoughts)

Tweaking Emacs' Text Indent: Don't Indent So Aggressively

Encouraged by my success a few days ago at finally learning how to disable vim's ctrl-spacebar behavior, the next day I went back to an emacs problem that's been bugging me for a while: in text mode, newline-and-indent always wants to indent the first line of a text file (something I almost never want), and skips blank lines when calculating indent (so starting a new paragraph doesn't reset the indent back to zero).

I had already googled to no avail, and had concluded that the only way was to write a new text-indent function which could be bound to the return key in the text mode hook.

This went fairly smoothly: I got a little help in #emacs with checking the pattern immediately before the cursor (though I turned out not to need that after all) and for the function called "bobp" (beginning of buffer predicate). Here's what I ended up with:

(defun newline-and-text-indent ()
  "Insert a newline, then indent the next line sensibly for text"
  (interactive)
  (if (or (bobp)
          (looking-at "^$"))
      (newline)
      (newline-and-indent)
  ))
(defun text-indent-hook ()
  (local-set-key "\C-m" 'newline-and-text-indent)
  )
(setq text-mode-hook 'text-indent-hook)

It seems to work fine. For the curious, here's my current .emacs

Tags: emacs, editors
[ 14:03 Feb 19, 2005    More linux/editors | permalink to this entry | ]