7.2 Specifying Word Entities

The variable edt-word-entities is used to emulate EDT’s ‘SET ENTITY WORD’ command. It contains a list of characters to be treated as words in themselves. If the user does not define edt-word-entities in his/her .emacs file, then it is set up with the EDT default containing only TAB.

The characters are stored in the list by their numerical values, not as strings. Emacs supports several ways to specify the numerical value of a character. One method is to use the question mark: ‘?A’ means the numerical value for ‘A’, ‘?/’ means the numerical value for ‘/’, and so on. Several unprintable characters have special representations:

?\b  specifies  BS, C-h
?\t  specifies  TAB, C-i
?\n  specifies  LFD, C-j
?\v  specifies  VTAB, C-k
?\f  specifies  FF, C-l
?\r  specifies  CR, C-m
?\e  specifies  ESC, C-[
?\\  specifies  \

Here are some examples:

(setq edt-word-entities '(?\t ?- ?/)) ; specifies TAB, - , and /
(setq edt-word-entities '(?\t)        ; specifies TAB, the default

You can also specify characters by their decimal ascii values:

(setq edt-word-entities '(9 45 47))   ; specifies TAB, - , and /