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pheaver / breadcrumb

Breadcrumb for Emacs
http://breadcrumbemacs.sourceforge.net/
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+TITLE: Breadcrumb for Emacs

+AUTHOR: Philip Weaver

+EMAIL: philip.weaver@gmail.com

+DATE: 2010-09-24

+DESCRIPTION:

+KEYWORDS:

+LANGUAGE: en

+OPTIONS: H:3 num:nil toc:nil \n:nil @:t ::t |:t ^:t -:t f:t *:t <:t

+OPTIONS: TeX:t LaTeX:nil skip:nil d:nil todo:t pri:nil tags:not-in-toc

+INFOJS_OPT: view:nil toc:nil ltoc:t mouse:underline buttons:0 path:http://orgmode.org/org-info.js

This is a fork of the Breadcrumb 1.1.4 package that is hosted at http://breadcrumbemacs.sourceforge.net/. The original package is written by William W. Wong.

The remainder of this document is copied and pasted from the commentary written by William W. Wong in breadcrumb.el, with a few additions by myself (Philip Weaver).

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation.

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 GNU Emacs; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the Free Software Foundation, 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

The Breadcrumb package allows you to set a series of breadcrumb bookmarks in Emacs and later jump to them quickly. They can be set with a key-stroke and jumped to with a key-stroke. The bookmarks are global across different Emacs buffers and thus leaving a trail of breadcrumb among them that you can jump back to easily. If a file is not loaded when jumping to its bookmark, it is loaded as a result.

Different types of buffer can be bookmarked. The supported types are: file, DIRED, Info, and system buffers.

The breadcrumb bookmarks are not the same as the Emacs built-in bookmark, which requires a name. The breadcrumb bookmarks have no names so that they can be set and jumped to quickly. When one is set, it is added to a circular queue. The bookmarks in the queue are cycled through when jumping. The command bc-previous jumps back in the reverse order of the bookmarks added. The command bc-next jumps forth in the order they are added. Basically bc-previous goes back in the list and bc-next goes forth in the list.

The bookmark queue's max size is controlled by the 'bc-bookmark-limit' variable. The oldest bookmark is dropped when adding a new one exceeds the limit. The default queue limit is 16. Feel free to increase it to the number of bookmarks you want to have.

Emacs' find-tag and tags-search have been hooked so that a breadcrumb bookmark is set when they are invoked. This allows tag search navigation to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to go back on. Add more defadvice hooks on other functions that you want to intercept.

When I started using Emacs, one feature I missed sorely from my old editor Epsilon is the ability to set a series of marks across different buffers and jump to them quickly. Emacs has the feature of set-mark-command and C-U C-SPC to jump back to the marks but that only works in the same buffer. Often time I needed to visit several files before jumping back to where I was, especially during tag-find navigation. Another option is to use the Emacs' bookmark feature, but that requires giving a name in setting and jumping, which is cumbersome to use.

Since none of the options are satisfactory, I ended up writing this package to address the need. Hope you find it helpful as well.

Put breadcrumb.el in your load-path. The load-path is usually =~/elisp/=. It's set in your .emacs, like this:

: (setq load-path (append (list (expand-file-name "~/elisp")) load-path))

Add the following to your .emacs startup file.

: (require 'breadcrumb)

or add the autoloads for the public command functions.

: (autoload 'bc-set "breadcrumb" "Set bookmark in current point." t) : (autoload 'bc-previous "breadcrumb" "Go to previous bookmark." t) : (autoload 'bc-next "breadcrumb" "Go to next bookmark." t) : (autoload 'bc-local-previous "breadcrumb" "Go to previous local bookmark." t) : (autoload 'bc-local-next "breadcrumb" "Go to next local bookmark." t) : (autoload 'bc-goto-current "breadcrumb" "Go to the current bookmark." t) : (autoload 'bc-list "breadcrumb" "List all bookmarks in menu mode." t) : (autoload 'bc-clear "breadcrumb" "Clear all bookmarks." t)

Assign the commands to some keys in your .emacs file.

Examples below assign a set of keys to the breadcrumb bookmark functions. : (global-set-key [(shift space)] 'bc-set) ;; Shift-SPACE for set bookmark : (global-set-key [(meta j)] 'bc-previous) ;; M-j for jump to previous : (global-set-key [(shift meta j)] 'bc-next) ;; Shift-M-j for jump to next : (global-set-key [(meta up)] 'bc-local-previous) ;; M-up-arrow for local previous : (global-set-key [(meta down)] 'bc-local-next) ;; M-down-arrow for local next : (global-set-key [(control c)(j)] 'bc-goto-current) ;; C-c j for jump to current bookmark : (global-set-key [(control x)(meta j)] 'bc-list) ;; C-x M-j for the bookmark menu list

Another set of bindings similar to MS Visual Studio bookmark setting. : (global-set-key [(control f2)] 'bc-set) : (global-set-key [(f2)] 'bc-previous) : (global-set-key [(shift f2)] 'bc-next) : (global-set-key [(meta f2)] 'bc-list)

Thanks to Karl Fogel for his bookmark.el package where I learned about bookmarking in Emacs.