Emacs rich-text mode: coloring and styling plain text (Shallow Thoughts)

Emacs rich-text mode: coloring and styling plain text

I use emacs a lot for taking notes, during meetings, while watching lectures in a MOOC, or while researching something.

But one place where emacs falls short is highlighting. For instance, if I paste a section of something I'm researching, then I want to add a comment about it, to differentiate the pasted part from my added comments, I have to resort to horrible hacks like "*********** My comment:". It's like the stuff Outlook users put in emails because they can't figure out how to quote.

What I really want is a simple rich-text mode, where I can highlight sections of text by changing color or making it italic, bold, underlined.

Enter enriched-mode. Start it with M-x enriched-mode and then you can apply some styles with commands like M-o i for italic, M-o b for bold, etc. These styles may or may not be visible depending on the font you're using; for instance, my font is already bold and emacs isn't smart enough to make it bolder, the way some programs are. So if one style doesn't work, try another one.

Enriched mode will save these styles when you save the file, with a markup syntax like <italic>This text is in italic.</italic> When you load the file, you'll just see the styles, not the markup.

Colors

But they're all pretty subtle. I still wanted colors, and none of the documentation tells you much about how to set them.

I found a few pages saying that you can change the color of text in an emacs buffer using the Edit menu, but I hide emacs's menus since I generally have no use for them: emacs can do everything from the keyboard, one of the things I like most about it, so why waste space on a menu I never use? I do that like this:

(tool-bar-mode 0)
(menu-bar-mode 0)

It turns out that although the right mouse button just extends the selection, Control-middleclick gives a context menu. Whew! Finally a way to change colors! But it's not at all easy to use: Control-middleclick, mouse over Foreground Color, slide right to Other..., click, and the menu goes away and now there's a prompt in the minibuffer where you can type in a color name.

Colors are saved in the file with a syntax like: <x-color><param>red</param>This text is in red.</x-color>

All that clicking is a lot of steps, and requires taking my hands off the keyboard. How do I change colors in an easier, keyboard driven way? I drew a complete blank with my web searches. A somewhat irritable person on #emacs eventually hinted that I should be using overlays, and I eventually figured out how to set overlay colors ((overlay-put (make-overlay ...)) turned out to be the way to do that) but it was a complete red herring: enriched-mode doesn't pay any attention to overlay colors. I don't know what overlays are useful for, but it's not that.

But in emacs, you can find out what's bound to a key with describe-key. Maybe that works for mouse clicks too? I ran describe-key, held down Control, clicked the middle button -- the context menu came up -- then navigated to Foreground Color and Other... and discovered that it's calling (facemenu-set-foreground COLOR &optional START END).

Binding to keys

Finally, a function I can bind to a key! COLOR is just a string, like "red". The documentation implies that START and END are optional, and that the function will apply to the selected region if there is one. But in practice, if you don't specify START and END, nothing happens, so you have to specify them. (region-beginning) and (region-end) work if you have a selected region.

Similarly, I learned that Face->italic from that same menu calls (facemenu-set-italic), and likewise for bold, underline etc. They work on the selected region.

But what if there's no region defined? I decided it might be nice to be able to set styles for the current line, without selecting it first. I can use (line-beginning-position) and (line-end-position) for START and END. So I wrote a wrapper function. For that, I didn't want to use specific functions like (facemenu-set-italic); I wanted to be able pass a property like "italic" to my wrapper function.

I found a way to do that: (put-text-property START END 'italic). But that wasn't quite enough, because put-text-property replaces all properties; you can't make something both italic and bold. To add a property without removing existing ones, use (add-text-properties START END (list 'face 'italic)).

So here's the final code that I put in my .emacs. I was out of excuses to procrastinate, and my enriched-mode bindings worked fine for taking notes on the project which had led to all this procrastination.

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;; Text colors/styles. You can use this in conjunction with enriched-mode.
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

;; rich-style will affect the style of either the selected region,
;; or the current line if no region is selected.
;; style may be an atom indicating a rich-style face,
;; e.g. 'italic or 'bold, using
;;   (put-text-property START END PROPERTY VALUE &optional OBJECT)
;; or a color string, e.g. "red", using
;;   (facemenu-set-foreground COLOR &optional START END)
;; or nil, in which case style will be removed.
(defun rich-style (style)
  (let* ((start (if (use-region-p)
                    (region-beginning) (line-beginning-position)))
                    
         (end   (if (use-region-p)
                    (region-end)  (line-end-position))))
    (cond
     ((null style)      (set-text-properties start end nil))
     ((stringp style)   (facemenu-set-foreground style start end))
     (t                 (add-text-properties start end (list 'face style)))
     )))

(defun enriched-mode-keys ()
  (define-key enriched-mode-map "\C-ci"
    (lambda () (interactive)    (rich-style 'italic)))
  (define-key enriched-mode-map "\C-cB"
    (lambda () (interactive)    (rich-style 'bold)))
  (define-key enriched-mode-map "\C-cu"
    (lambda () (interactive)    (rich-style 'underline)))
  (define-key enriched-mode-map "\C-cr"
    (lambda () (interactive)    (rich-style "red")))
  ;; Repeat for any other colors you want from rgb.txt

  (define-key enriched-mode-map (kbd "C-c ")
    (lambda () (interactive)    (rich-style nil)))
  )
(add-hook 'enriched-mode-hook 'enriched-mode-keys)