Re: Emacs with Mathematica
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg116691] Re: Emacs with Mathematica
- From: Just A Stranger <forpeopleidontknow at gmail.com>
- Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2011 06:21:58 -0500 (EST)
On 02/20/2011 02:25 AM, David Bailey wrote: > On 18/02/2011 09:35, Just A Stranger wrote: >> I've been finding the notebook interface terribly lacking for basic text >> editing. A lot of mouse moving, not a whole lot of keyboard combinations >> to move the cursor and highlighting. >> >> I've found two emacs mathematica mode packages. Anyone ever used these? >> Had any trouble with them? (I'm not too concerned with pretty-print, so >> that is not an issue.) >> >> Is the notebook interface really lacking in program editing power, or >> am I missing something? Have any of you found any better solutions than >> resorting to some old emacs package last updated in 2005? >> >> Thanks :) >> > I like to put code into .m files, because these seem to edit more > conveniently than .nb files - in particular, the text does not move > about as you add brackets! > > Using an external text editor is only really feasible for .m files, but > even there, you have the problem that a lot of Mathematica characters > appear in the form \[Alpha]. Depending on what you are doing, this can > be a real pain! > > While the built-in editor may not have all the features of your > favourite text editor, it has one feature that I find invaluable. > Starting from the cursor position, you can progressively expand the > selection to successively larger expressions by pressing Control-. (or > the equivalent in non-Windows environments). This lets you pick out a > whole expression taking care of operator precedence and bracket > counting. You can also do this with multiple fast mouse clicks. > > David Bailey > http://www.dbaileyconsultancy.co.uk > > Yea, I should try using that more often. I'm still learning what shortcuts there are, but the available ones did seem pretty sparse. Maybe my issue is just takes some getting used to the way the interface moves around the cursor. Mathematica does mitigate the need to write encylopedia sets worth of code that would make those code-ninja keyboard features necessary. Thanks for the reply