Re: emacs and beginning of lines

[Marcin Borkowski <mbork@wmi.amu.edu.pl>]

Dnia 2014-09-07, o godz. 23:32:25
Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> napisał(a):

> Marcin Borkowski <mbork@wmi.amu.edu.pl> writes:
> 
> > BTW: back-to-indentation seems to be broken with
> > visual-line-mode; it doesn't take into consideration,
> > well, /visual/ lines. One might argue that it is a
> > feature, but I think this is a bug: I guess that
> > visual-line-mode is primarily useful for editing
> > texts in natural languages
> 
> Yes, primarily that, like in plain text files. (Tho I
> would recommend filling for that as well, as said.)

If you use a VCS and look at a diff from time to time, filling might
be a bad idea.  (Though visual-line-mode is not helpful then, either.)

> > (or markup languages, like LaTeX in my case)
> 
> Secondarily that, but for a .tex file you might as well
> use auto-fill-mode as when you compile it (into a PDF)
> that will be treated as unbroken lines.

As above.

> The second complication is that in the .pdf, it may
> look like this "My friends told me" - say you want to
> change that to "My associates" or whatever - and you
> make a search for "My friends" - no hit! Because in the
> source, it appears at the end of a line and there is a
> "source line break" (but not PDF line break) right
> after "My". A regexp search would do it, but it is
> nothing I would like to do habitually and I wouldn't
> intuitively think of that right away. Could be
> automatized, perhaps...

I vaguely remember reading somewhere that Emacs 24.4 solves this...

> Searching for stuff in LaTeX source can actually be
> tedious for this reason, but on a larger scale as well,
> because of the markup in general. But for words that
> are bold, for example, you see they are bold instantly
> (in the .pdf), but for line breaks it doesn't show that
> way.

True.

> Is there a LaTeX submode for hiding markup or search
> function to disregard it?

That would be cool.  Hiding is much easier, AFAIK AUCTeX supports
that.  Searching might be tricky, though.  (If all you need is
searching for a sequence of /words/, it would probably make it
easier.  Also, you could have a second buffer with all your document
"detexified" and somehow link it to the main one...  A bit of overhead
with updating it, but probably doable.)

> Those and other reasons is why I always stick to plain
> text unless for really ambitious documents like thesis
> and books/manuals that are intended for printing. It is
> just so much more overhead than the simple and sweet
> science of putting together plain text files and
> messages. It is also more honest: if you are a moron,
> it'll show. There is just no where to hide between
> fancy markup.

Fair enough.  OTOH, some things are easier to mark up (at least for
me) in LaTeX than, say, in Org-mode.  But it might be the question of
experience and my habits...

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Adam Mickiewicz University