[Howm-eng 114] How to bind M-RET to insert { } in howm buffers?

[Howm-eng 114] How to bind M-RET to insert { } in howm buffers?

[areiner]

Hi,

hoping that this list is still functional, here is something that I
have been longing for for quite some time; but, alas!, my Emacs skills
are insufficient to implement this myself.

What I would like is to make M-RET, inside howm buffers, insert a new
item in a to do list, i.e. insert a newline, followed by "{ } "
indented by the same amount as any preceding item.  (This would be
analogous to, e.g., various TeX modes that start a new \item.)

E.g., given the following buffer contents:

________________________________________________________________

foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar
baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo
bar baz foo bar baz AAA foo bar baz foo bar baz BBB

{ } foo CCC bar DDD
{ } baz
    { } foo EEE bar FFF

GGG
________________________________________________________________

Hitting M-RET should have this effect:

- on AAA or BBB or CCC or DDD: insert "\n{ } " (since no indentation
  is implied by previous lines);

- on EEE or FFF: insert "\n    { } " (since we are on an item indented
  by four spaces already)

While this is not in any way urgent, any help would be very much
appreciated.

(BTW, I have been using Howm heavily for about a year, and it has
become very important to me.  Thank you so much for writing and
maintaining Howm!)

Regards,

Albert.

[Howm-eng 115] Re: How to bind M-RET to insert { } in howm buffers?

[khi]

Hi, Albert san.

Would you try this `my-newline-with-todo'?
http://howm.osdn.jp/cgi-bin/hiki/hiki.cgi?Comment

howm.el is still alive because I'm using it every day by myself :)

-- 
khi at users.sourceforge.jp

[Howm-eng 116] Re: How to bind M-RET to insert { } in howm buffers?

[areiner]

On Sun, Sep 11, 2016 at 02:32:06AM +0900, khi at users.sourceforge.jp wrote:
> Would you try this `my-newline-with-todo'?
> http://howm.osdn.jp/cgi-bin/hiki/hiki.cgi?Comment

Thanks!  This was enough to get me started; I had to make some minor
changes:

- change the pattern "^[[:blank:]]*{ } " to "^[[:blank:]]*{ }" (remove
  trailing space), or otherwise the first item would have only one,
  the second one always two spaces after "{ }".

- binding the key does not work with [(meta return)] but only with
  "\M-\r" - presumably this has to do with my emacs version: "GNU
  Emacs 24.4.1 (i486-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.4.2) of 2015-01-12
  on babin, modified by Debian"

- and, of course, the function to bind is not, as on the wiki,
  'my-erase-header but 'my-newline-with-todo.

This does, it seems, exactly what I wanted it to do, although at the
moment I don't understand why it works even for multi-line to do
entries.  Thanks a lot!

> howm.el is still alive because I'm using it every day by myself :)

Indeed, it is an incredibly useful tool!  It took me some time to get
used to it, but now I certainly would not want to miss it any more!

Thanks, and best regards,

Albert.