/gempesaw/writing

Cleaning up whitespace in directories with some elisp

· planet emacsen emacs elisp elisp solves problems cleanup-buffer on the shoulders of giants cleanup-in-directory match recursive defun me writing self cleanup whitespace

I had a project with an outdated indentation convention. Present-me recently decided to change bracket conventions from the way past-me had been doing things. So, I updated my emacs settings so that magnar's (cleanup-buffer) function would properly format the files. But, there were multiple files in the project and I didn't feel like manually opening each one just to cleanup (C-c n) and save (M-s) it. So, I had emacs do it for me, relying heavily on the excellent f.el library and the aforementioned (cleanup-buffer).

(require 'f)
(defun cleanup-in-directory (directory &optional match recursive)
  (let* ((matcher (if (not (eq nil match))
                      (lambda (file) (string-match match it))
                    nil))
         (files (f-files directory matcher recursive)))
    (mapc (lambda (file)
            (ignore-errors
              (find-file file)
              (cleanup-buffer)
              (save-buffer)))
          files)))

(cleanup-in-directory "/opt/honeydew/lib" ".pm$" t)
(cleanup-in-directory "/opt/honeydew/bin")

It takes a directory, a regex to optionally match against, and a flag to determine whether or not to recurse the parent directory. Small problem, small elisp: problem solved :).

I did glance at the changes before committing them, and caught one case where the formatter got confused and stopped indenting things entirely, but there was only one such case that I noticed...