Moving regions up and down by lines

Moving regions up and down by lines

[Dave Benjamin]

Greetings,

I have these two functions defined, which allow me to move the region up 
and down by one or more lines, displacing the text around it. This works 
pretty well, but after the call to yank, the region is no longer 
selected (I use transient-mark-mode). I've tried calling 
exchange-point-and-mark after the yank, but it has no effect. Does 
anyone know how to accomplish this?

(defun move-region-up (arg)
   (interactive "p")
   (kill-region (region-beginning) (region-end))
   (unwind-protect
       (previous-line arg)
     (yank)))

(defun move-region-down (arg)
   (interactive "p")
   (kill-region (region-beginning) (region-end))
   (unwind-protect
       (next-line arg)
     (yank)))

Thanks,
Dave

Re: Moving regions up and down by lines

[martin rudalics]

You should use `transpose-regions'.  Have a look at the attachment of

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2007-03/msg01230.html

for a treatment of this.

Re: Moving regions up and down by lines

[Dave Benjamin]

martin rudalics wrote:
> You should use `transpose-regions'.  Have a look at the attachment of
> 
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2007-03/msg01230.html
> 
> for a treatment of this.

Thanks for the pointers! A call to (setq deactivate-mark nil) at the end 
of each function is all I needed. I like your idea of dragging the 
current line if the mark is not active.

Are you planning on releasing m&d somewhere? It looks like quite an 
ambitious effort.

Dave

Re: Moving regions up and down by lines

[martin rudalics]

 > Thanks for the pointers! A call to (setq deactivate-mark nil) at the end
 > of each function is all I needed.

Though a kill and a subsequent yank is an overkill.  `transpose-regions'
is now working reliably, you should use it.

 > Are you planning on releasing m&d somewhere? It looks like quite an
 > ambitious effort.

Earlier versions worked well with text-mode and broke with programming
languages.  Currently, it doesn't work nicely with interpunctuation in
text modes.  I'd have to fix that eventually.