Emacs: prevent cursor movement when scrolling off of the screen

Question

I am reviewing some code in emacs that has a series of for loops that span several pages. The indentations done by the author are poor so it is not easy to tell where loops begi

Answer 1

I think you're looking for the wrong solution.

Place your cursor on loops starting parenthesis or curly bracket and press C-M-n This runs the command forward-list which will jump your cursor to the matching end paren or curly brace.

Open the buffer, move to the starting paren, use C-x 3 to split the window in half, move to the new window, and use forward-list now you should have the starting paren in view on the left and the ending paren in view on the right.

Alternatively, use hideshow to collapse blocks of code inside the loop to shrink the size and potentially fit it on one screen.

Also look into follow-mode this will allow you to view one buffer in multiple windows continuously effectively doubling or tripling the number of continuous lines of code you can see. This will work with show-paren-mode.

Also if the indentation is really so terrible, run mark-whole-buffer and indent-region to fix it up.