It Software

Copyright (C) **** by Tom Breton

Author: Tom Breton " >

Created: 19 Jan, 1999

Version: 0.0

This file is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify

it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by

the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)

any later version.

This file is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,

but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of

MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the

GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License

along with GNU Emacs; see the file COPYING. If not, write to

the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330,

Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

A recipe for using skeleton.el

The package skeleton.el seems one of the more underused packages in

the emacs distribution. This is unfortunate, because even simple

skeletons can be quite useful.

In an effort to help this situation, I'm going to give you a simple

recipe for making a skeleton.

I'm not belittling the skeleton.el docs. They seem to be complete;

there is a lot of helpful information in the function documentation

strings; examples are included. What they don't give you is a recipe.

All the advanced features are covered, but the effect is to make you

think that to use skeletons, you have to master all those features.

You don't.

The recipe I'm going to give you is essentially what I did for

lisp-skels.el. I'm not going to cover any advanced features. That

would defeat my purpose, which is to make skeleton.el more accessible.

Once you've started using skeletons, it will be easy enuff to learn

the advanced features when you need them.

I'm going to use tehom-let-skel as an example. The first thing to do

is to write down the output you want, like this:

(let Then surround it with quote-marks:

"(let "

If there were any characters that needed to be escaped, like you

would have had to escape them, which means putting \ in front of them.

Now you are ready to start the skeleton proper, so write:

(define-skeleton tehom-let-skel

)

...and add a documentation string describing what it does, and the

symbol "nil".

(define-skeleton tehom-let-skel

"Insert a let in all its glory."

nil

)

You probably want to know why you should put nil there. That's

because a skeleton starts with an interactor, which is something you

don't need to understand in order to build a simple skeleton like this

one. The symbol nil acts like an interactor that does nothing.

Then add what you wrote before, so it looks like this:

(define-skeleton tehom-let-skel

"Insert a let in all its glory."

nil

"(let Now, this already works. Try it in *scratch*.

But it probably doesn't do exactly what you want. For one thing, you

have no control over the formatting. If you insert a let in the

middle of a heavily indented function, it will indent just two spaces

as you did before, instead of indenting properly.

This is what the symbols \n and > are used for. Everywhere there is a

newline in the body string, you want a newline (\n) and indentation . So first, separate out the newlines with quotation marks. This

will split your string into more strings, but that's not a problem.

(define-skeleton tehom-let-skel

"Insert a let in all its glory."

nil

"(let"

" Now every place there was a newline before, insert the newline symbol

\n and the indentation mark >, so it looks like:

(define-skeleton tehom-let-skel

"Insert a let in all its glory."

nil

\n >

"(let"

\n >

" "

\n >

\n >

")"

)

There's one more symbol I'm going to teach you about, _. It indicates

the place in your skeleton that "stuff would go into". If there are

several places that more text would go into, it indicates the most

important one. In this case, it's the body of the let. All you need

to do is to add '_':

(define-skeleton tehom-let-skel

"Insert a let in all its glory."

What does that let you do? Go into *scratch* and try this: First,

copy the define-skeleton we just made and type a linefeed (C-j) to

make emacs read it. Then make some part of the buffer the active

region -- any part. You can do this by typing C-@ at the beginning of

the region and moving the point to the end of it. Without doing

anything else, type ESC - and then M-x tehom-let-skel. Neat, eh?

Skeletons are useful, and I hope this file will let more people use

them.

skel-recipe.txt ends here

Copyright (C) 1999 by Tom Breton

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