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expand-region.el

Expand region increases the selected region by semantic units. Just keep pressing the key until it selects what you want.

An example:

(setq alphabet-start "abc def")

With the cursor at the c, it starts by marking the entire word abc, then expand to the contents of the quotes abc def, then to the entire quote "abc def", then to the contents of the sexp setq alphabet-start "abc def" and finally to the entire sexp.

You can set it up like this:

(require 'expand-region)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-=") 'er/expand-region)

If you expand too far, you can contract the region by pressing - (minus key), or by prefixing the shortcut you defined with a negative argument: C-- C-=.

Maintenance warning

I use this package every day, and have been doing so for years. It just works. At least, it works for all my use cases. And if it breaks somehow, I fix it.

However, it has become painfully clear to me that I don't have time to fix problems I don't have. It's been years since I could keep pace with the issues and pull requests. Whenever I try, I keep getting feedback that my fix isn't good enough by some standard I don't particularly care about.

So, I have closed the issue tracker and the pull requests. I hope you can happily use this package, just like I do. If it doesn't work for you, then I'm sorry. Thankfully Emacs is infinitely malleable, you can probably fix it yourself.

TLDR: I am still maintaining this package, but I am no longer crowdsourcing a list of issues.

Video

You can watch an intro to expand-region at Emacs Rocks.

Installation

I highly recommend installing expand-region through elpa.

It's available on MELPA:

M-x package-install expand-region

Via use-package:

(use-package expand-region
  :bind ("C-=" . er/expand-region))

Language support

Expand region works fairly well with most languages, due to the general nature of the basic expansions:

er/mark-word
er/mark-symbol
er/mark-symbol-with-prefix
er/mark-next-accessor
er/mark-method-call
er/mark-inside-quotes
er/mark-outside-quotes
er/mark-inside-pairs
er/mark-outside-pairs
er/mark-comment
er/mark-url
er/mark-email
er/mark-defun

However, most languages also will benefit from some specially crafted expansions. For instance, expand-region comes with these extra expansions for html-mode:

er/mark-html-attribute
er/mark-inner-tag
er/mark-outer-tag

You can add your own expansions to the languages of your choice simply by creating a function that looks around point to see if it's inside or looking at the construct you want to mark, and if so - mark it.

There's plenty of examples to look at in these files.

After you make your function, add it to a buffer-local version of the er/try-expand-list.

Example:

Let's say you want expand-region to also mark paragraphs and pages in text-mode. Incidentally Emacs already comes with mark-paragraph and mark-page. To add it to the try-list, do this:

(defun er/add-text-mode-expansions ()
  (make-variable-buffer-local 'er/try-expand-list)
  (setq er/try-expand-list (append
                            er/try-expand-list
                            '(mark-paragraph
                              mark-page))))

(add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'er/add-text-mode-expansions)

Add that to its own file, and add it to the expand-region.el-file, where it says "Mode-specific expansions"

Warning: Badly written expansions might slow down expand-region dramatically. Remember to exit quickly before you start traversing the entire document looking for constructs to mark.

Contribute

If you make some nice expansions for your favorite mode, it would be great if you opened a pull-request. The repo is at:

https://github.com/magnars/expand-region.el

All changes must be accompanied by feature tests. They are written in Ecukes, a Cucumber for Emacs.

To fetch the test dependencies, install cask if you haven't already, then:

$ cd /path/to/expand-region
$ cask

Run the tests with:

$ ./run-tests.sh

If feature tests are missing for the mode you are changing, please make sure to add a set of basic tests around the functionality you're changing.

Contributors

Language specific contributions

Thanks!

Changelog

From 0.11 to 0.12 (WIP)

From 0.10 to 0.11

From 0.9 to 0.10

From 0.8 to 0.9

From 0.7 to 0.8

License

Copyright (C) 2011-2019 Magnar Sveen

Author: Magnar Sveen magnars@gmail.com Keywords: marking region

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.