I use emacs for my creative writing. To better analyze the structure of my sentences I would like to see my paragraphs displayed as consisting of one sentence per line. So I need a function that can take a normal auto-filled paragraph and do the following: 1) stretches all sentences into one line, and 2) put only one sentence per line.
Imagine I had written the following paragraph (lyrics from Suzanne Vega)
My name is Luka. I live on the second floor. I live upstairs from you. Yes I think you've seen me before. If you hear something late at night. Some kind of trouble. Some kind of fight.
With the function I want the paragraph would appear like this:
My name is Luka.
I live on the second floor.
I live upstairs from you.
Yes I think you've seen me before.
If you hear something late at night.
Some kind of trouble.
Some kind of fight.
Since I would like to do some of the writing when the sentences are displayed like this, the function should in addition to stretching out the sentences also turn off the autofill mode.
Ideally I would like a function that can toggle the display between auto-fill mode with all sentences wrapped, and this new mode with auto-fill turned off and all sentences stretched out.
Thanks in advance to all sort of suggestions or help to make such a function!
@Drew: Here is a text I am not able to split up with your code:
There are two ways to enable it: the first is with M-x visual-line-mode (for those with real menus, apparently Options->Line Wrapping in this Buffer->Word Wrap), which will give you a minor mode “wrap” in the mode line. As explained in C-h f visual-line-mode, one of the effects of this command is to subtly change the effect of commands that deal with “lines”: C-a, C-e no longer go to the end of the line (as in \n), but go to the end of the line (as in display line). M-a, M-e still work as they should. In addition, vertical split windows are guaranteed to not be truncated, and resize properly on changing width. Works wonderfully, especially if you have free form text that you’re keeping in version control (like a thesis in Latex) where hard-wrapping just doesn’t work out very well. It also makes vertical splitting much more useful, especially with huge windows. In my experience, it slows down redraw a little bit, but it’s worth it.
I guess something like this is what you're asking for.
(defun split-para-at-sentence-ends ()
"Split current paragraph into lines with one sentence each.
Then turn off `auto-fill-mode'."
(interactive)
(let ((mode major-mode))
(unwind-protect
(progn (text-mode)
(save-excursion
(let ((emacs-lisp-docstring-fill-column t)
(fill-column (point-max)))
(fill-paragraph))
(let ((bop (copy-marker (progn (backward-paragraph) (point))))
(eop (copy-marker (progn (forward-paragraph) (point)))))
(goto-char bop)
(while (< (point) eop)
(forward-sentence)
(forward-whitespace 1)
(unless (>= (point) eop)
(delete-horizontal-space)
(insert "\n"))))))
(funcall mode)))
(auto-fill-mode -1))
(define-minor-mode split-para-mode
"Toggle between a filled paragraph and one split into sentences."
nil nil nil
(if (not split-para-mode)
(split-para-at-sentence-ends)
(auto-fill-mode 1)
(fill-paragraph)))
(global-set-key "\C-o" 'split-para-mode) ; Or some other key.