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I know this isn't quite what the article was about, but when he said "modelines" I thought of the lines you can place in a comment in a file to set editor optio

I know this isn't quite what the article was about, but when he said "modelines" I thought of the lines you can place in a comment in a file to set editor options. For example, http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Modeline_magic http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Modeline_magic It's great for making things consistent within a file when the editors people are using might not be consistent in their configuration. For example, I might be collaborating with one person who uses tabs with a shift width of 8, while in my own writing I may prefer to use 4 spaces. So I can add: /* vim: set noexpandtab:sw=8:ts=8 */ and suddenly vim will realize that it should treat an input of <tab> as a tab character and render them as 8 characters. Alternately, if I were writing a document where I wanted all lines to be automatically wrapped to be within 80 characters but I usually let them continue indefinitely, I could add /* vim: set wrap:tw=80 */ and I quickly have a per-file way of setting my editor's configuration.

sid0 17y ago
Yeah, emacs has them too. Interestingly, I've noticed that Komodo supports emacs modelines, but vim doesn't.
- aerique 17y ago
  Emacs ought to understand Vim modelines. That would be very Emacs.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    How do you map vim to emacs? Emacs has much richer (for example) indentation properties; so there is not enough information for it to do the right thing. For simple things, like tab width, it could be made compatible, however. Personally, I prefer a human-readable set of guidelines, then I just configure emacs (via eproject) to set things up correctly for each project. Not as easy, I guess, but then new files I create for the project have the right settings by default.
aeroevan 17y ago
Same here. I was really hoping that this was a translation between vim and emacs modelines. That would actually be useful.
shabble 17y ago
The equivalent for Emacs (sometimes known as the "Hey, Emacs!" line, is documented at http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Specifying-File-Variables.html#Specifying-File-Variables http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Spe... There's also ways to set directory tree specific variables as well, so you can override the defaults for all files in a particular project. Very handy.

sid0 17y ago

Yeah, emacs has them too. Interestingly, I've noticed that Komodo supports emacs modelines, but vim doesn't.

aerique 17y ago
Emacs ought to understand Vim modelines. That would be very Emacs.
- jrockway 17y ago
  How do you map vim to emacs? Emacs has much richer (for example) indentation properties; so there is not enough information for it to do the right thing. For simple things, like tab width, it could be made compatible, however. Personally, I prefer a human-readable set of guidelines, then I just configure emacs (via eproject) to set things up correctly for each project. Not as easy, I guess, but then new files I create for the project have the right settings by default.

aeroevan 17y ago

Same here. I was really hoping that this was a translation between vim and emacs modelines. That would actually be useful.

shabble 17y ago

The equivalent for Emacs (sometimes known as the "Hey, Emacs!" line, is documented at http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Specifying-File-Variables.html#Specifying-File-Variables http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Spe... There's also ways to set directory tree specific variables as well, so you can override the defaults for all files in a particular project. Very handy.