Re: Question on using emacs to write html

[Tim McNamara]

Jeff <jeffrey@cunningham.net> writes:

> I've been programming so long using emacs that other key bindings
> drive me crazy. Lately I've been writing html using emacs because
> bluefish uses the Microsoft bindings. Is there a way to bind keys to
> the insertion of common toggle pairs, like <center></center>,
> <table></table>, <td></td>, <a href=""></a>, and so on? Is there a
> way to have this work only in an 'html mode'?

Try "html-helper-mode" which works like a charm.  It has a menu (with
associated key bindings) for most tags and such.  You can even select
a string and html-helper-mode will place the opening and closing tags
in their proper places.  Trick!

The only trouble I've had- and it's *really* minor- is that it spends
a bit of time fontifying files, not much of a problem except on big
files.  html-helper-mode colors tags and text very nicely and it's
easy to see the structure of the document.  I haven't tried it with
jit-lock or lazy-lock, which might speed up that fontifying.

There are a number of HTML/XML/SGML type modes available.  XML-mode
works OK, I prefer html-helper-mode (although XML-mode has a menu
item for previewing the buffer in a browser, which is really handy
for checking quickly and easily on the effects of any changes to the
code; I should suggest this for html-helper-mode, unless the
maintainer sees this before I get around to it).