html-helper-mode

Versions

(7/6/98) html-helper-mode is in a transitional state right now. This web page is for version 2.0, the last "official" release that I made. The documentation and code here work together. But 2.0 isn't the best version - you probably want to be running 2.19.1.1, the beta version. The code works just great and the documentation is 98% accurate. Download that instead from the beta page.

Jeff Covey is working on new documentation for 2.19.1.1. It's available at his web site, and is also part of an RPM package for Redhat Linux systems. Eventually I'll update the pages here with the new docs, sorry for the confusion. Development also continues at a snail's pace - HTML 4.0 tags are underway, and I have a nifty new timestamp function (see below).

html-helper-mode is an emacs mode to make editing HTML files easier, inspired by Marc Andreessen's html-mode. html-helper-mode does most of the things that html-mode does, but with a slightly different interface and lots of new features. (Emacs is a super-powerful editor that does everything in the world.)

tempo.el, a generic template insertion facility for emacs by David Kågedal
html-helper-mode.el, the actual editing mode.

Put these files in your load-path and byte compile them (if you want). Then arrange for html-helper-mode to be loaded: the easiest way is to put this in your .emacs:

  (autoload 'html-helper-mode "html-helper-mode" "Yay HTML" t)
  (setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("\\.html$" . html-helper-mode) auto-mode-alist))

Alternately, you can get an entire distribution of html-helper-mode, including these HTML documents, as html-helper-mode.tar.gz.

The version of tempo.el I am now distributing is version 1.2.2. There are lots of new things in this version: the relevant change here is the completion code has been updated to be consistent with post emacs-19.26 definitions of the \= regexp token. If completion wasn't working before, try this version. I still have version 1.0 around if you need it.

User contributed code

Other users have written emacs packages that make editing HTML in emacs more pleasant. My new beta will integrate these fairly nicely. You can get:

font-lock support. by Ulrik Dickow.
browse-url, nice integration between emacs and your favourite Web browser. From Denis Howe <dbh@doc.ic.ac.uk>.

You can get there from here

tempo.el (local copy, known to work with html-helper-mode)
html-helper-mode.el
Documentation for html-helper-mode
How to configure html-helper-mode
A list of keybindings
Differences between html-helper-mode and html-mode
Changelog for html-helper-mode
The official ftp site for tempo.el.
User contributed font-lock support.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to David Kågedal <davidk@lysator.liu.se> for coming along at just the right time with tempo.el, the basic template code that underlies html-helper-mode. Many of the neat features like completion and field support are because of his good design and programming.

Thanks to Ulrik Dickow for his font-lock code.

Thanks to the author of cc-mode, Barry Warsaw <baw@anthem.nlm.nih.gov>, his code provided a useful guide in writing this mode (not to mention saving me many hours of formatting C, C++, and Objective C!)

My appreciation to Marc Andreessen <marca@netscape.com>, the author of the original html-mode.

And finally, many thanks to the various people on the net who have been offering encouragement, suggestions, and example code. Y'all're the main reason I'm writing this, and the main reason it's usable.

New HTML document writers should read something like the HTML primer. The references at the bottom of the primer are all worth following. Yahoo has a good index of HTML info on the Web.

Nelson Minar	Created: February 1, 1994
`<nelson@media.mit.edu>`	Updated: August 6, 1998