Here are several functions concerned with balanced-parenthesis expressions (also called sexps in connection with moving across them in Emacs). The syntax table controls how these functions interpret various characters; see Syntax Tables. See Parsing Expressions, for lower-level primitives for scanning sexps or parts of sexps. For user-level commands, see Commands for Editing with Parentheses in The GNU Emacs Manual.
This function moves forward across arg (default 1) balanced groups of parentheses. (Other syntactic entities such as words or paired string quotes are ignored.)
This function moves backward across arg (default 1) balanced groups of parentheses. (Other syntactic entities such as words or paired string quotes are ignored.)
This function moves forward out of arg (default 1) levels of
parentheses. A negative argument means move backward but still to a
less deep spot. If escape-strings is non-nil
(as it is
interactively), move out of enclosing strings as well. If
no-syntax-crossing is non-nil
(as it is interactively), prefer
to break out of any enclosing string instead of moving to the start of
a list broken across multiple strings. On error, location of point is
unspecified.
This function is just like up-list
, but with a negated argument.
This function moves forward into arg (default 1) levels of parentheses. A negative argument means move backward but still go deeper in parentheses (−arg levels).
This function moves forward across arg (default 1) balanced expressions. Balanced expressions include both those delimited by parentheses and other kinds, such as words and string constants. See Parsing Expressions. For example,
---------- Buffer: foo ---------- (concat∗ "foo " (car x) y z) ---------- Buffer: foo ----------
(forward-sexp 3) ⇒ nil ---------- Buffer: foo ---------- (concat "foo " (car x) y∗ z) ---------- Buffer: foo ----------
This function moves backward across arg (default 1) balanced expressions.
This function moves back to the argth beginning of a defun. If arg is negative, this actually moves forward, but it still moves to the beginning of a defun, not to the end of one. arg defaults to 1.
This function moves forward to the argth end of a defun. If arg is negative, this actually moves backward, but it still moves to the end of a defun, not to the beginning of one. arg defaults to 1.
If non-nil
, this buffer-local variable holds a regular
expression that specifies what text can appear before the
open-parenthesis that starts a defun. That is to say, a defun begins
on a line that starts with a match for this regular expression,
followed by a character with open-parenthesis syntax.
If this variable’s value is non-nil
, an open parenthesis in
column 0 is considered to be the start of a defun. If it is
nil
, an open parenthesis in column 0 has no special meaning.
The default is t
. If a string literal happens to have a
parenthesis in column 0, escape it with a backslash to avoid a false
positive.
If non-nil
, this variable holds a function for finding the
beginning of a defun. The function beginning-of-defun
calls this function instead of using its normal method, passing it its
optional argument. If the argument is non-nil
, the function
should move back by that many functions, like
beginning-of-defun
does.
If non-nil
, this variable holds a function for finding the end of
a defun. The function end-of-defun
calls this function instead
of using its normal method.
If Emacs is compiled with tree-sitter, it can use the tree-sitter
parser information to move across syntax constructs. Since what
exactly is considered a defun varies between languages, a major mode
should set treesit-defun-type-regexp
to determine that. Then
the mode can get navigation-by-defun functionality for free, by using
treesit-beginning-of-defun
and treesit-end-of-defun
.
This variable determines which nodes are considered defuns by Emacs. It can be a regexp that matches the type of defun nodes. (For “node” and “node type”, see Parsing Program Source.)
For example, python-mode
sets this variable to a regexp that
matches either ‘function_definition’ or ‘class_definition’.
Sometimes not all nodes matched by the regexp are valid defuns.
Therefore, this variable can also be a cons cell of the form
(regexp . pred), where pred should be a function
that takes a node as its argument, and returns non-nil
if the
node is a valid defun, or nil
if it is not valid.
This variable determines how Emacs treats nested defuns. If the value
is top-level
, navigation functions only move across top-level
defuns. If the value is nested
, navigation functions recognize
nested defuns.