Re: Automatic shell CR escape \ alignment

[Tim Landscheidt <tim@tim-landscheidt.de>]

Tracy Reed <treed@edirectpublishing.com> wrote:

> When doing something like:

> command -option1 reallylongargument          \
>         -option2 evenlongerargumentfoo       \
>         -option3 oddlengthreallylongargument \
>         -option4 reallylongargument          \

> I really like to keep my code to 80 columns and line up those line-ending
> escape slashes so it looks neat.  A few years ago someone showed me a really
> cool trick to be used when making shell scripts tidy: When in shell mode you
> could do something such that it would handle the column of \ in a special way and
> always keep them lined up and move them all in or out together whenever the
> length of the longest line changed. I have forgotten how it was done. Anyone
> know?

The basic concept is handled by align.el and there, appar-
ently, by basic-line-continuation. I don't know what custom-
izations you need for shell scripts, though (I usually pre-
fer manually calling align-regexp).

Tim