The other day I was trawling through Aaron Hawley’s excellent Emacs Reference Sheet and came across the entry for【Ctrl+x Ctrl+v Return】saying “same as previous.” The previous entry was for revert-buffer. My first thought was “How did I not know this?” I use revert-buffer a lot when I’m syncing files between computers with Git so this would really be useful to me. My next thought was, “Gee, I should blog about this.”
I remembered that every time I call revert-buffer it tells me that I can run it with【Super+u】 as well as with a menu. I always ignored these because I don’t have a 【Super】 key and I avoid using the menu interface. Why didn’t it tell me about the much easier【Ctrl+x Ctrl+v】? So I called【Ctrl+h k Ctrl+x Ctrl+v】to see what it said. Of course, it said that【Ctrl+x Ctrl+v】runs find-alternate-file (actually ido-find-alternate-file in my case), something I already knew but forgot in the excitement of discovering something new. I was disappointed that my discovery didn’t work out. I thought that Hawley must have made a typo.
Today, I came across the same entry and this time I noticed that 【Return】 at the end of the 【Ctrl+x Ctrl+v】. Suddenly, it all made sense. The 【Ctrl+x Ctrl+v】 does run find-alternate-file and the 【Return】 selects the current buffer’s file so the result the same as revert-buffer.
This is another one of those small things about Emacs that doesn’t seem like much but does, in fact, make my life easier. It was there all the time if I’d had the wits to see it. Fortunately, I had Hawley to help me see the light.