[Beacon] Converting help buffer text into lists

[trev-dev]

I was able to wrap my head around this problem using multiple cursors, but not beacon mode. I am curious, how would you solve this problem using Meow?

The Sample:

‘trailing-whitespace’
     The face for highlighting excess spaces and tabs at the end of a
     line when ‘show-trailing-whitespace’ is non-‘nil’ (*note Useless
     Whitespace::).
‘escape-glyph’
     The face for displaying control characters and escape sequences
     (*note Text Display::).
‘homoglyph’
     The face for displaying lookalike characters, i.e., characters that
     look like but are not the characters being represented (*note Text
     Display::).
‘nobreak-space’
     The face for displaying no-break space characters (*note Text
     Display::).
‘nobreak-hyphen’
     The face for displaying no-break hyphen characters (*note Text
     Display::).
‘mode-line’
     This face is used for the mode line of the currently selected
     window, and for menu bars when toolkit menus are not used.  By
     default, it’s drawn with shadows for a raised effect on graphical
     displays, and drawn as the inverse of the default face on
     non-windowed terminals.
‘mode-line-inactive’
     Like ‘mode-line’, but used for mode lines of the windows other than
     the selected one (if ‘mode-line-in-non-selected-windows’ is
     non-‘nil’).  This face inherits from ‘mode-line’, so changes in
     that face affect mode lines in all windows.
‘mode-line-highlight’
     Like ‘highlight’, but used for mouse-sensitive portions of text on
     mode lines.  Such portions of text typically pop up tooltips (*note
     Tooltips::) when the mouse pointer hovers above them.
‘mode-line-buffer-id’
     This face is used for buffer identification parts in the mode line.
‘header-line’
     Similar to ‘mode-line’ for a window’s header line, which appears at
     the top of a window just as the mode line appears at the bottom.
     Most windows do not have a header line—only some special modes,
     such Info mode, create one.
‘header-line-highlight’
     Similar to ‘highlight’ and ‘mode-line-highlight’, but used for
     mouse-sensitive portions of text on header lines.  This is a
     separate face because the ‘header-line’ face might be customized in
     a way that does not interact well with ‘highlight’.

The desired outcome:

`(trailing-whitespace)
`(escape-glyph)
`(homoglyph)
`(nobreak-space)
`(nobreak-hyphen)
`(mode-line)
`(mode-line-inactive)
`(mode-line-highlight)
`(mode-line-buffer-id)
`(header-line)
`(header-line-highlight)

I feel like this was challenging to do this elegantly with beacon for a couple of reasons:

1. Lack of simple, unique characters or words to find or select word/symbol for
2. Variance in the number of lines for each element
3. Inability to select a chunk of white-space. I solved this using multiple-cursors by:
   • Selecting a region
   • Using mc/mark-all-in-region for 5 spaces
   • Deleting the description text and newlines.
   • Leaving mc mode, re-selecting what's left. Use mc/edit lines to get a uniform cursor per line
   • The rest is trivial

[eshrh]

Lol at some point i bite the bullet and drop back to some good old regex ^'(.*)' and elisp string concatenation...

[trev-dev]

I managed to do it with beacon by "scanning" forward and watching the beacon positions. If there's a better way I am open to it :)

Cc: @eshrh

[eshrh]

I've got no idea, I was never particularly good at using the beacon anyway. Like I said my first instinct when i saw your post would have been to drop into my scratch buffer and get hacking haha

[fbergroth]

M-x flush-lines and input ^ (caret space) is another way to get rid of the text. After that a beacon follows nicely.

You can create a cursor on every symbol by doing (when beacon is active) C-M-s ^‘ RET and press n (or meow-search) to create the cursors.

[fbergroth]

3. Inability to select a chunk of white-space. I solved this using multiple-cursors by:

(So it's possible to create cursors in the same way you did with multiple cursors by doing C-M-s to search for whitespaces (five spaces or leading ws) followed by meow-search.)

[trev-dev]

Both of these tips are amazing and simple to follow, nice!

[DogLooksGood]

ssr-2022-07-21_07.30.12.mp4

With another buffer, it's easier. Let me explain.

[DogLooksGood]

First, do a regexp-isearch. meow-visit and meow-search use the same ring with C-M-s. So if you search something like ^‘, then you can mark all of them in BEACON state with meow-search.

Then you F3 to start, copy the symbol to another buffer, go back, and F4.

[DogLooksGood]

Just noticed the order is wrong. So after yank, you should insert a newline at the beginning of line, instead of at the end of line. It could be a bug, I don't know why the order is reversed.

[DogLooksGood]

Just committed the patch to fix this. 0c97796

[trev-dev]

something like ^‘

This was my first instinct until I realized that ‘ is not a character on my keyboard

Thanks for the solution!