Nameless — less is more

Hide package namespaces in your emacs-lisp code.

Simply put, turn on this minor mode, and the namespace prefix of the package you’re editing will be hidden by a :. Here’s a comparison. The image to the left is what you normally see. The image to the right has nameless-mode turned on.

Usage

To use this package add the following configuration to your Emacs init file.

(add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode-hook #'nameless-mode)

You can configure a string to use instead of : by setting the nameless-prefix, and the name of the face used is nameless-face. You can even just hide the prefix completely by setting this variable to an empty string.

While the mode is active, the C-c C-- key inserts the package namespace if appropriate.

Configuration

Quickly typing the namespace

nameless-mode binds the C-c C-- key to nameless-insert-name, which immediately inserts the current name for you, or even expands aliases to the names they point to.

Let’s say you’re in a file called foo-bar.el.

   C-c C-- → foo-bar-
fl C-c C-- → font-lock-

There’s also a command called nameless-insert-name-or-self-insert. You can bind this to the _ key and make it even faster to insert the name.

Configuring the namespace name

Nameless guesses the package name with the lm-get-package-name function, but sometimes this might not match the name you want to use.

In these situations, simply set nameless-current-name as file-local variable. To do that, invoke the following command:

M-x add-file-local-variable RET nameless-current-name RET "package-name"

You can also set the same name for all lisp files in a project by setting dir-local variables with:

M-x add-dir-local-variable RET emacs-lisp-mode RET nameless-current-name RET "package-name"

If you don’t want Nameless to use a namespace name at all (neither manual nor automatic), you can set nameless-discover-current-name to nil. This will disable this functionality, so that Nameless will only use aliases (see next item).

Requiring other packages as aliases

Nameless can also be used to “import” other packages as aliases. For instance, in the default behaviour, functions in the font-lock package (e.g., font-lock-add-keywords) will be displayed with the fl: prefix (e.g., fl:add-keywords).

You can configure your own aliases globally with nameless-global-aliases.

(setq nameless-global-aliases '(("fl" . "font-lock")
                                ("s" . "seq")
                                ("me" . "macroexp")
                                ("c" . "cider")
                                ("q" . "queue")))

You can also configure aliases per-file by setting nameless-aliases as a file-local variable.

;; Local Variables:
;; nameless-aliases: (("c" . "cider"))
;; End:

Note that there’s no quote before ((c!
You can also configure it for a whole project, by setting it as a dir-local variable.

Private symbols

Private symbols in elisp are written with an extra dash after the prefix (e.g., foobar--indent-impl). With Nameless, these are usually displayed as :-indent-impl, but you can also make them be displayed as ::indent-impl by setting

(setq nameless-private-prefix t)

Packages that don’t use - (hyphen) as a separator

You can set nameless-separator file-locally to whatever separator you package uses. Most packages use hyphens, but some use /, |, or :.

You can also set it to nil globally and the separator will never be hidden, and will not be inserted with `-name-insert-` functions.

Indentation and paragraph filling

Hiding parts of symbols could affect the way Emacs indents your code and fills your paragraphs. Nameless lets you decide whether you want that to happen or not.

The default behavior is that code is indented according to what you see (i.e., according to short symbols), but text inside strings is not. So text inside strings will be filled in the same way as if you didn’t have nameless-mode. Here’s how a docstring might be filled with nameless-mode enabled:

If point is immediately after an alias configured in the name you
had in `:aliases' or `:global-aliases', replace
it with the full name for that alias.

Altough it may look strange that the second line is so short, that’s the correct way. When viewed in a *Help* buffer, that docstring will look like this:

If point is immediately after an alias configured in the name you
had in `nameless-aliases' or `nameless-global-aliases', replace
it with the full name for that alias.

To change this behavior, configure the variable nameless-affect-indentation-and-filling.