Fence Edit provides a convenient way to edit the contents of "fenced code blocks" used by markup formats like Markdown in a dedicated window set to the major mode appropriate for its language.
Simply bind a key to fence-edit-code-at-point and call it from within any code
block matching one of the patterns described in fence-edit-blocks.
Based on a language symbol extracted from the fence block pattern, the
corresponding mode in fence-edit-lang-modes will be set for the edit buffer.
The key configurable components in Fence Edit are available through the
customize facility within Emacs, though of course you can also set the
appropriate variables in your configuration scripts if you so desire.
Fundamentally, Fence Edit provides a way to recognize a block of code "fenced" by patterns defined in regular expressions and to associate that with a language symbol. The language symbol, in turn, is associated with a mode name, and the code (without its fencing text) will be edited in a split window using that mode.
This is useful to edit code appearing in Markdown files, for example, which I use to author blog posts. It is very useful to have the syntax highlighting, indenting, and other helpful features of the language's major mode when editing custom code for blog posts.
Since the code block "fence" patterns are configurable, there is no limitation to how you can use Fence Edit.
When fence-edit-code-at-point is called, it attempts to find a code block
around point using the patterns in fence-edit-blocks. If one is found, a new
window is opened containing the code between the fences, set to the major mode
activated by the language symbol with -mode appended, or, for languages
without a direct -mode suffix mode, the mode defined in
fence-edit-lang-modes.
Within the code editing window, you can press C-c ' to copy the edited code
back to its original location, or C-c C-k to discard your edits. In both
situations, the new window is destroyed and you are returned to a convenient
cursor location.
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.