CODEWITHSUNDEEP
emacselisp
eastafri
eastafri

Reputation: 2226

Italicise word in emacs

I am slightly new to emacs. I am editing a document in latex and I have words that I would like to put in italics. I would like a simple macro where if I place a cursor on the word, and hit a key combination the word is sorrounded with italics like this \textit{word}.

Is there a plugin or a quick way to achieve this or an emacs-lisp macro?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 295

Answers (1)

elemakil
elemakil

Reputation: 3811

Personally, I use AUCTeX for TeX/LaTeX editing in emacs. There is a number of good tutorials on how to use it out there, e.g. A simpleton's guide to (…)TeX workflow with emacs or Emacs as the Ultimate LaTeX Editor. To answer your question: yes this is possible and AUCTeX provides the tools:

The relevant chapter in the manual is Changing the Font, excerpt from manual:

AUCTeX provides convenient keyboard shortcuts for inserting macros which specify the font to be used for typesetting certain parts of the text. They start with C-c C-f, and the last C- combination tells AUCTeX which font you want:

[...]

 C-c C-f C-i

    Insert italics ‘\textit{∗}’ text.

If you execute the command with an active region it will place that region into the argument of the formatting command. Without a region, the formatting command will be inserted and you and enter the desired content.

By combining this with a package such as expand-region or thing-cmds you can change the format of a word in to steps

  1. Mark the word(s) using expand-region / mark-thing
  2. Apply format using AUCTeX

One could combine those two steps into one fire-and-forget function (e.g. TeX-italicise-word, however, I strongly advise against doing so because (in my opinion) emacs' true power comes from composing functions / actions.

If you really insist on a single-key solution I suggest you read up on Keyboard Macros which can be used to create composite commands in an interactive manner.

Upvotes: 4

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