fancy-narrow

Emacs package to immitate narrow-to-region with more eye-candy.

Unlike narrow-to-region, which completely hides text outside the narrowed region, this package simply deemphasizes the text, makes it readonly, and makes it unreachable.This leads to a much more natural feeling, where the region stays static (instead of being brutally moved to a blank slate) and is clearly highlighted with respect to the rest of the buffer.

Simply call fancy-narrow-to-region to see it in action. To widen the region again afterwards use fancy-widen.

To customise the face used to deemphasize unreachable text, customise fancy-narrow-blocked-face. There is a known bug at the moment, which is that comments and strings don't deemphasize correctly.

Note this is designed for user interaction. For using within lisp code, the standard narrow-to-region is preferable, because the fancy version is susceptible to inhibit-read-only and some corner cases.