A Editor Feature for Extending Selection based on Language Syntax

[limodou]

On 20 Aug 2006 21:49:45 -0700, Xah Lee <xah at xahlee.org> wrote:
> can anyone give me a guide about writing a short elisp function? (for
> non-emacs readers, this message will describe a editor feature i think
> will be very beneficial to spread this concept.)
>
> i want to write a function such that, when run, highlight a region
> between the nearest left and right delimiters. Delimiters are any of
> parenthesis, square brackets, or single and double quotes etc. When the
> function is run again, it extends the selection to the next enclosing
> delimiters.
>
> So, in this way, a user can repeatedly press a keyboard shortcut and
> extend the selection.

This functionality can be found in NewEdit
(http://wiki.woodpecker.org.cn/moin/NewEdit), first put the caret in
middle of delimeters, such as ''""(){}[], then press Ctrl+E, the text
between delimeters will be selected. And there are two direction of
selection, left first and right first(Ctrl+Shift+E). If you press
Ctrl+Alt+E again, the the delimeters will be selected.
>
> This is feature of BBEdit/TextWrangler on the Mac, which extend
> selection to the nearest outer parenthesis. This is also a feature of
> the Mathematica editor, which actually extend selection to the nearest
> syntactical unit in the language, not just paired delimiters.
>
> What i wanted this for is mostly in editing HTML/XML, where one press
> can select the content, another press will include the enclosing tags,
> another press extends the selection to the next outer content, and
> another press include that tags too, and so on.
>
NewEdit can not support this feature now.


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