7.2 Specifying Word Entities

The variable edt-word-entities is used to emulate EDT's ‘SET ENTITY WORD’ command. It contains a list of characters to be treated as words in themselves. If the user does not define edt-word-entities in his/her .emacs file, then it is set up with the EDT default containing only <TAB>.

The characters are stored in the list by their numerical values, not as strings. Emacs supports several ways to specify the numerical value of a character. One method is to use the question mark: ‘?A’ means the numerical value for ‘A’, ‘?/’ means the numerical value for ‘/’, and so on. Several unprintable characters have special representations:

     ?\b  specifies  BS, C-h
     ?\t  specifies  TAB, C-i
     ?\n  specifies  LFD, C-j
     ?\v  specifies  VTAB, C-k
     ?\f  specifies  FF, C-l
     ?\r  specifies  CR, C-m
     ?\e  specifies  ESC, C-[
     ?\\  specifies  \

Here are some examples:

     (setq edt-word-entities '(?\t ?- ?/)) ; specifies TAB, - , and /
     (setq edt-word-entities '(?\t)        ; specifies TAB, the default

You can also specify characters by their decimal ascii values:

     (setq edt-word-entities '(9 45 47))   ; specifies TAB, - , and /