I’m probably the last Emacs user to discover this but here’s a nifty trick that I learned today while trawling through some of Magnar Sveen’s .emacs.d files. If you hold down the shift key when moving the point, the region is extended. For example, if we have
the region is extended. For example,
^
with the point at the g in region and we type 【Shift+Meta+f】 3 times, we will have
gion is extended
selected. This is really handy for selecting a range of text, although to be fair, Sveen claims that true Emacs Knights don’t use this mode. He apparently prefers to use some of his finer grained extensions such as the expand-region package. I’ve also loaded that package and will write about it after I’ve used it for a while.
In the meantime, shift-select-mode seems like a handy feature to me. It’s enabled by default in Emacs 24 (at least) so you can try it out on any buffer you have open. You can read the documentation by asking for help on shift-select-mode.