Lockdown Beam
As mentioned briefly at the end of the previous
entry, today we are
going to play with Emacs’
Eldoc. Sometimes
I forget about it, but eldoc-mode
is one of those subtle things which improve
my daily Emacs routine. Besides giving me useful information in Elisp,
eldoc-mode
is always helpful when I am programming in Clojure thanks to its
integration with CIDER.
However, there is another place where Eldoc comes in handy. You surely know that when you press M-: you can type an expression in the minibuffer and then evaluate it by pressing RET. But wouldn’t it be great to have Eldoc for these quick runs to?
The answer is not “Well, yes!”, but “Hey, there is a mode for it!”, which is what an Emacser regularly replies when asked about any matter whatsoever. This time the mode comes with the package of the day: Thierry Volpiatto’s eldoc-eval.
Once installed, activating eldoc-eval
is easy. Turn on eldoc-in-minibuffer-mode
and everything is set.
Nice and simple. You may not like the Eldoc information appearing in the
mode-line, but Thierry got you covered with eldoc-in-minibuffer-show-fn
. If
you use tooltips, try setting this to #'tooltip-show
. There are other features
in eldoc-eval
worth of notice, so be sure to check out its README if you want
more juice.
As for me, I am happy with just enabling eldoc-in-minibuffer-mode
. I patched
eldoc-show-in-mode-line
to fit the help message properly in my custom
mode-line, but that’s it. If you are using your own mode-line too, I am leaving
that as a little exercise.1
Next time we will meet a Git-related package which doesn’t include the letters “m” and “a” in its name.
Stay safe.
-
I used
el-patch
for this. ↩