mosu's tips
Switching identifier naming style between Camel Case and C style in Emacs
Friday 11 December 2009 @ 10:50 pm

There are several naming styles for identifiers used in programming. Some use-dashes-between-words (e.g. Lisp), others MashWordsTogetherAndCapitalizeThem (most often called Camel Case), and a third one puts_underscores_between_characters_and_converts_everything_to_lower_case (sometimes called “C style”).

Often I have to convert code from one naming convention to another. When I have to do that this usually happens with languages that often use both styles, e.g. C/C++ or even PHP and Ruby. For those cases I’ve written an Emacs Lisp function that can convert the identifier at point from C style naming to Camel Case style and back. It detects the current style by looking for an underscore. Here’s the code:

  1. (defun mo-toggle-identifier-naming-style ()
  2.   "Toggles the symbol at point between C-style naming,
  3. e.g. `hello_world_string', and camel case,
  4. e.g. `HelloWorldString'."
  5.   (interactive)
  6.   (let* ((symbol-pos (bounds-of-thing-at-point 'symbol))
  7.          case-fold-search symbol-at-point cstyle regexp func)
  8.     (unless symbol-pos
  9.       (error "No symbol at point"))
  10.     (save-excursion
  11.       (narrow-to-region (car symbol-pos) (cdr symbol-pos))
  12.       (setq cstyle (string-match-p "_" (buffer-string))
  13.             regexp (if cstyle "\\(?:\\_<\\|_\\)\\(\\w\\)" "\\([A-Z]\\)")
  14.             func (if cstyle
  15.                      'capitalize
  16.                    (lambda (s)
  17.                      (concat (if (= (match-beginning 1)
  18.                                     (car symbol-pos))
  19.                                  ""
  20.                                "_")
  21.                              (downcase s)))))
  22.       (goto-char (point-min))
  23.       (while (re-search-forward regexp nil t)
  24.         (replace-match (funcall func (match-string 1))
  25.                        t nil))
  26.       (widen))))

The code was inspired by a question on StackOverflow about this topic.

Comments (2) - Posted in Programming by mosu  


An interactive, iterative ‘git blame’ mode for Emacs
Friday 23 October 2009 @ 4:10 pm

I’m an active user of Magit for all my Git needs within Emacs. One thing I’ve always found missing was nice support for ‘git blame’ — and by ‘nice’ I mean some more comfort than the simple display of its output.

When I’m hunting bugs one thing I often need is not only the information who modified a certain line but also who modified the line before that. Also what I’d like is having both the source code (including syntax highlighting, of course) and the blame information shown side-by-side with quick access to the log message for particular commits.

That’s what ‘mo-git-blame’ tries to solve. It is a standalone mode that can be used with any of the various Git version control modes. Here are a couple of its features:

  • Shows the output of ‘git blame’ and the file content side-by-side with syntax highlighting for the content
  • Show the log messages for the current revision or the revision in the current line
  • Show the diff (via ‘git show’) for the current revision or the revision in the current line
  • Show the file content for the revision in the current line
  • Call ‘git blame’ for the same file for the revision in the current line

Here’s what it looks like:

Screenshot of Emacs with mo-git-blame-mode

Screenshot of Emacs with mo-git-blame-mode

You can download the sources from my Git repository or directly with

  1. git clone git://git.bunkus.org/mo-git-blame.git

Installation and usage instructions are included both in the file itself and its README, but here’s the short version:

  1. (add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/mo-git-blame")
  2. (autoload 'mo-git-blame-file "mo-git-blame" nil t)
  3. (autoload 'mo-git-blame-current "mo-git-blame" nil t)
Comments (1) - Posted in Programming by mosu  


Different background images and page layouts in a single PDF with Prawn
Saturday 18 July 2009 @ 3:28 pm

The Prawn PDF library contains an option for adding arbitrary images as background onto each page of a PDF. Unfortunately this option cannot be customized further leading to a couple of limitations that we worked around at my company. The letters and PDFs sent out always have different page layouts. The first page contains a much more detailed background image containing things like addresses, bank information and other information required by German law. The second and all following pages only contain a stripped-down version of that background image. As the first page also contains the recipient’s address  the area containing the actual text differs from one page to another.

Achieving this with Prawn is rather easy if you know that all of Prawn’s own rendering functions like text or table use the start_new_page method whenever the current page is full. As start_new_page accepts an options hash for modifying the page layout of the new page it obvious that this is the place we have to hook in to. Here’s the code that lets us do that:

  1. module Prawn
  2.   class Document
  3.     alias_method :orig_start_new_page, :start_new_page unless method_defined? :orig_start_new_page
  4.  
  5.     def run_before_new_page(&block)
  6.       @run_before_new_page_blocks ||= Array.new
  7.       @run_before_new_page_blocks <<  Proc.new(&block)
  8.     end
  9.  
  10.     def run_after_new_page(&block)
  11.       @run_after_new_page_blocks ||= Array.new
  12.       @run_after_new_page_blocks <<  Proc.new(&block)
  13.     end
  14.  
  15.     def start_new_page(options = {})
  16.       run_blocks @run_before_new_page_blocks, options
  17.       self.orig_start_new_page options
  18.       run_blocks @run_after_new_page_blocks
  19.     end
  20.  
  21.     protected
  22.  
  23.     def run_blocks(blocks, *args)
  24.       return if !blocks || blocks.empty?
  25.       blocks.each { |block| block.arity == 0 ? self.instance_eval(&block) : block.call(self, *args) }
  26.     end
  27.   end
  28. end

Here’s a short explanation:

  1. In line 3 we rename Prawn’s original start_new_page to orig_start_new_page because we want to use it later on in our own version of start_new_page.
  2. Two new methods run_before_new_page and run_after_new_page provide the hooks to the users of the Prawn::Document class. The first hook is run before the original start_new_page method is called while the second hook is run afterwards. The before hook can be used to modify the options hash passed to start_new_method (this is were the page’s bounding box can be changed) and the after hook is used for displaying pictures.

But how is this used for actual content? That’s easy:

  1. Prawn::Document.generate "start_new_page_demo.pdf", :page_size => "A4" do
  2.   run_before_new_page do |pdf, options|
  3.     options[:top_margin] = cm2pt(4.0)
  4.   end
  5.  
  6.   run_after_new_page do
  7.     image "background_page2_200dpi.png",
  8.       :at  => [-bounds.absolute_left, Prawn::Document::SIZES["A4"][1] - bounds.absolute_bottom],
  9.       :fit => Prawn::Document::SIZES["A4"]
  10.   end
  11.  
  12.   # This image only appears on the first page.
  13.   image "background_page1_200dpi.png",
  14.     :at  => [-bounds.absolute_left, Prawn::Document::SIZES["A4"][1] - bounds.absolute_bottom],
  15.     :fit => Prawn::Document::SIZES["A4"]
  16.  
  17.   # Draw enough text to ensure that a second page is created.
  18.   text "Hello, page 1!\n\n"
  19.   text "lorem ipsum" * 400
  20.   text "\nAnd now we're on another page."
  21. end

You’ll notice several things:

  1. The blocks passed to run_before_new_page and run_after_new_page can be used with or without local parameters. If you want to modify the options hash then you have to use local variables for run_before_new_page, but you usually don’t need them for run_after_new_page. The latter also only takes a single argument, the Prawn::Document instance usually named "pdf".
  2. Both block types are not called for the very first page. The reason is that Prawn::Document’s initialize method calls start_new_page before the hooks are registered themselves. However, this is fortunate for us because it makes switching background images easier.
  3. I’m letting Prawn scale the images to the page size. This is done because the images themselves have a very high resolution so that zooming into the PDF will not make them look bad even at low zoom levels.

If you’re curious what the result looks like then download the resulting PDF. It was generated with a more elaborate version of the code pasted above which in turn can be downloaded here as well. Please note that the images have been smudged on purpose for this demonstration — the originals look just fine.

A final note if you want to use this in a Rails project: simply put the extension to the Prawn::Document class into a file in the config/initializers directory, e.g. config/initializers/prawn_extensions.rb. Don’t forget to restart the server afterwards or it won’t pick up the new file.

Comments (0) - Posted in Programming by mosu