SQL Movement Commands

Most programming modes in Emacs support two commands, beginning-of-defun and end-of-defun.  These move you to the beginning and end of the nearest function, and by default are bound to C-M-a and C-M-e, respectively.

However, sql-mode does not have anything similar.  I have the above two commands bound to C-up and C-down for quickly moving around functions, but I find myself often hitting them when viewing an SQL file to move through tables—which doesn’t work.  Fortunately that functionality is pretty easy to add.

For my fellow Emacs users, here is some code I whipped up that you can use to easily move between tables and views.

  1. (defconst sql-beginning-of-table-or-view-regexp
  2. "^\\s-*create\\s-+\\(?:table\\|view\\)"
  3. "Regular expression for matching the start of an SQL table or view definition.")
  4.  
  5. (defun sql-prev-table-or-view ()
  6. "Move backwards to the beginning of the nearest table or view
  7. from point."
  8. (interactive)
  9. (re-search-backward sql-beginning-of-table-or-view-regexp
  10. nil ‘noerror))
  11.  
  12. (defun sql-next-table-or-view ()
  13. "Move forwards to the beginning of the nearest table or view from point."
  14. (interactive)
  15. (re-search-forward sql-beginning-of-table-or-view-regexp
  16. nil ‘noerror))

Then you can add a hook for sql-mode to bind those commands to keys whenever sql-mode is first loaded. I know you guys already know about using global-set-key, but you can also create key bindings specific for modes. Each mode in Emacs has an associated “mode map”, for example, sql-mode has the sql-mode-map, php-mode has the php-mode-map, et cetera. You can use the function define-key to create a binding for a specific mode map. Like I said, I have C-up and C-down globally bound to move functions, but I use define-key like this to make the keys move by tables/views is sql-mode:

  1. (global-set-key (kbd "<C-up>") ‘beginning-of-defun)
  2. (global-set-key (kbd "<C-down>") ‘end-of-defun)
  3.  
  4. (add-hook ‘sql-mode-hook
  5. (lambda ()
  6. (define-key sql-mode-map (kbd "<C-up>")
  7. ‘sql-prev-table-or-view)
  8. (define-key sql-mode-map (kbd "<C-down>")
  9. ‘sql-next-table-or-view)))

I put my global key settings in there just for comparison. The call to define-key is almost identical, except the first argument is the mode map.

While I’m on the subject, there are two similar commands for text-mode that have no default binding, which I find come in handy:

  1. (add-hook ‘text-mode-hook
  2. (lambda ()
  3. (define-key text-mode-map (kbd "<C-down>")
  4. ‘forward-paragraph)
  5. (define-key text-mode-map (kbd "<C-up>")
  6. ‘backward-paragraph)))

So there’s some hopefully useful commands for SQL work, and for configuring key bindings in general.

Related posts:

  1. Tab Completion for Custom Commands
  2. Indent on Save, Maybe
  3. Versioning Word Documents In Git
  4. Javascript: Notes on Scoping
0 Comment   |   Posted in Emacs,IDEs,SQL,blog,elisp by EricR on January 22, 2010

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