Kill This Buffer

[Editorial Note: Sorry about the lousy formatting. Org2blog is misbehaving again so I had to paste the HTML into the WordPress editor.]

Ben Maughan over at Pragmatic Emacs has a really nice tip. It’s one of
those things that you (or at least I) don’t think about but once you
see the tip, you think, “That’s just what I need.” The idea is to kill
the current buffer without asking.

Maughan asks how many times you’ve called kill-buffer via
【Ctrl+x k】and wanted to kill some buffer other than the one you’re in. I can’t
ever remember doing that. Maughan provides a one line fix to your
init.el that will just delete the current buffer without asking.
Perfect.

If you think you’ll sometimes want the old behavior and don’t want to
remember kill-buffer, it’s trivial to add a bit of Elisp that
calls kill-this-buffer unless the universal argument is provided in
which case it calls kill-buffer. Bind this to
【Ctrl+x k】 and you have the best of both worlds.
Here’s some code that does that

(defun jcs-kill-a-buffer (askp)
  (interactive "P")
  (if askp
      (kill-buffer (funcall completing-read-function
                            "Kill buffer: "
                            (mapcar #'buffer-name (buffer-list))))
    (kill-this-buffer)))

(global-set-key (kbd "C-x k") 'jcs-kill-a-buffer)