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Skeletons are an shorthand extension to the Lisp language, where various
atoms directly perform either actions on the current buffer or rudimentary
flow control mechanisms. Skeletons are interpreted by the function
skeleton-insert
.
A skeleton is a list starting with an interactor, which is usually a
prompt-string, or nil
when not needed, but can also be a Lisp
expression for complex read functions or for returning some calculated value.
The rest of the list are any number of elements as described in the following
table:
"
string"
, ?
c, ?\
cskeleton-transformation
when that is non-nil
.
?\n
?\n
to prevent
alignment. Use "\n"
as the first or last string element of a
skeleton to insert a newline unconditionally.
_
_
where nothing is wrapped.
>
_
, and
there is an interregion that will be wrapped here, indent that interregion.
&
|
-
numberskeleton-untabify
.
()
or nil
str
v1
, v2
'
expressionstr
in the subskeleton. They can also be used non-interactively, when
prompt is a lisp-expression that returns successive list-elements.
resume:
quit
nil
when the resume:
section was entered
because the user quit.
Some modes also use other skeleton elements they themselves defined. For
example in shell script mode's skeletons you will find <
which does a
rigid indentation backwards, or in CC mode's skeletons you find the
self-inserting elements {
and }
. These are defined by the
buffer-local variable skeleton-further-elements
which is a list of
variables bound while interpreting a skeleton.
The macro define-skeleton
defines a command for interpreting a
skeleton. The first argument is the command name, the second is a
documentation string, and the rest is an interactor and any number of skeleton
elements together forming a skeleton. This skeleton is assigned to a variable
of the same name as the command and can thus be overridden from your
~/.emacs file (see Init File).