Emacs: pulsar version 1.0.0

Pulsar is a small package that temporarily highlights the current line, either on demand or automatically after invoking a function that is present in a user-defined list. Watch the demo

Further below are the release notes.

Below are the release notes.


  • The next-buffer and previous-buffer commands are added to the default value of the user option pulsar-pulse-functions. They will now trigger a pulse effect after they are called (if pulsar-mode is enabled in the current buffer or pulsar-global-mode is in use).

  • The command pulsar-recenter-middle is now an alias for pulsar-recenter-center, instead of being the original name. Users do not need to change anything on their end: this is just an internal arrangement to use a name that corresponds to the one of the underlying “recenter” mechanism.

  • The Lisp macro that was used to derive the Pulsar “recenter” commands has been removed. The commands are pulsar-recenter-top and pulsar-recenter-center. I originally thought the macro would be useful in more places, but I ended up relying on it only twice.

    Thanks to Ryan Kaskel for pointing out an intermediate typo/error I made while redefining the macro and before I decided to remove it altogether. This was done as a comment on the GitHub mirror: https://github.com/protesilaos/pulsar/commit/c5086de779a0226d72eca4d5cba8c7689bc278b2#r123397272.

  • The Lisp macro pulsar-pulse-with-face is renamed to pulsar-define-pulse-with-face. Its definition is updated to simplify how a Pulsar function is defined with a given face. Examples of such functions are pulsar-pulse-line-red, pulsar-pulse-line-blue.

  • Pulsar now retrieves the absolute beginning of the minibuffer prompt. This means that a pulse in the minibuffer will cover the text of the prompt, as opposed to only affecting the input area. As such, the pulse is visible even if the minibuffer is empty (e.g. what happens with the default completion setup when calling M-x).

  • The manual provides instructions on how to set up Pulsar to produce a pulse when the minibuffer is activated. It cannot be done with the pulsar-pulse-functions, though the setup is not too involved. In short:

    (add-hook 'minibuffer-setup-hook #'pulsar-pulse-line)
    
    ;; OR something like this, replacing "blue" with one among red,
    ;; green, yellow, magenta, cyan:
    (add-hook 'minibuffer-setup-hook #'pulsar-pulse-line-blue)