How to read, in pieces, across a very wide line, eg 432 chars?

How to read, in pieces, across a very wide line, eg 432 chars?

[David Combs]

Easy enough to read the left end, or the right end, but the
stuff in between is just about impossible to see.

So, how to sort of "tab" your way across it?  (Maybe
that's the answer: redefine tab to be 120 chars, and
indeed tab across.  But how to back up "two tabs"
to again see that already viewed part of the line?

One place you get these super-wide lines is when copying
and pasting a series of amazon reviews into an emacs
buffer.  Each paragraph in a review pastes (yanks) in
as one *WIDE* line.

And to save vertical space on the screen, you do NOT
want to M-q (fill) the thing.  

In fact, you might
have to successive paragraphs, each existing within an 
emacs buffer as a super-wide string, almost identical strings (obviously
a contrived situation), and you want to "tab across"
the WHOLE BUFFER, so you can look at corresponding
parts of two WIDE lines.


So, I'd like to march across the line, or sometimes the entire screen
of such lines, in maybe 80-wide pieces if in a
90-wide window (so each piece has some overlap at its start and end).

Ideas?

Thanks,

David

Re: How to read, in pieces, across a very wide line, eg 432 chars?

[Damien Wyart]

* dkcombs@panix.com (David Combs) in gnu.emacs.help:
> So, I'd like to march across the line, or sometimes the entire screen
> of such lines, in maybe 80-wide pieces if in a 90-wide window (so each
> piece has some overlap at its start and end).

You might define in elisp a few simple commands going by several chars
or words at once (using forward-char, forward-word and so on), but maybe
a simpler solution is to use the (relatively) recent additions of Emacs
to simplify working with long lines: long line mode and visual line
mode.

More details here:
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/LongLines
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/VisualLineMode
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/LineWrap

-- 
DW

Re: How to read, in pieces, across a very wide line, eg 432 chars?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: dkcombs@panix.com (David Combs)
> Date: 3 Oct 2013 04:33:38 -0400
> 
> Easy enough to read the left end, or the right end, but the
> stuff in between is just about impossible to see.

Are you talking about the situation when truncate-lines is non-nil?
If not, then what is the problem to read the whole line?

If this is for truncate-lines non-nil, then just move across the line
with cursor motion commands: once you get too close to the right
margin, Emacs will scroll the line horizontally to bring the next
portion into view.

> One place you get these super-wide lines is when copying
> and pasting a series of amazon reviews into an emacs
> buffer.  Each paragraph in a review pastes (yanks) in
> as one *WIDE* line.
> 
> And to save vertical space on the screen, you do NOT
> want to M-q (fill) the thing.  

What about "M-x visual-line-mode RET"?  Does it do what you want?