elisp

I'm having difficulty distinguishing files with extensions, from files without extensions, and hidden files. I'm using (file-name-extension (dired-get-file-for-visit)) in dired-mode, and the type of file extension determines what action to take -- e.g., open in Emacs, or open externally with a particular application. A hidden file (e.g., .hidden ) returns a value of nil instead of "hidden" . A file with no extension (e.g., foo ) also returns a value of nil . Can anyone suggest an alternative method to handle this? (let* ( (input-regexp '("odt" "wpd" "docx" "doc" "xls" "pdf" "tif" "bmp" "jpg"))

My preferred method of indicating a location within a document that requires attention is with three asterisks *** . When it comes time to select the region containing the three asterisks using shift+right-word or shift+left-word , those functions skip over the three asterisks and move along to the next word. When I peeked inside bindings.el , I saw that left-word and right-word are adaptations of forward-word and backward-word , that are traceable to built-in functions in the C source code. Essentially, I'm looking for left-word and right-word that includes symbols such as three asterisks ***

I have a minor mode. If that mode is active and the user hits DEL, I want to do some action, but only if some condition holds. If the condition holds and the action is executed I want to do nothing more after that. But if the condition fails, I don't want to do anything and let the default DEL action execute. Not sure how I could solve this. But I guess I could do it in two ways: 1) I could rebind the DEL key to a function in the minor mode and then check if the conditions holds ot not. But then how do I know what the default command to DEL is? 2) I could add a pre command hook like this.

In Eclipse, highlighting multiple rows and pressing Ctrl+/ comments each of the lines of the selection. Emacs has a function comment-or-uncomment-region that is close what I want, but behaves differently if the region only partially covers the lines I'm trying to comment. Is there any way I make a function similar to comment-or-uncomment-region , but have it comment each of the lines of the region regardless of how the region is selected? In other words, I want the function to act as though the region occupies the whole line as long as the region includes that line, so it behaves as Eclipse's

I'm trying to detect the size of the screen I'm starting emacs on, and adjust the size and position the window it is starting in (I guess that's the frame in emacs-speak) accordingly. I'm trying to set up my .emacs so that I always get a "reasonably-big" window with it's top-left corner near the top-left of my screen. I guess this is a big ask for the general case, so to narrow things down a bit I'm most interested in GNU Emacs 22 on Windows and (Debian) Linux. Bryan Oakley If you want to change the size according to resolution you can do something like this (adjusting the preferred width and