Irreal

Grant Rettke points to a discussion in the comments from a Sacha Chua post. It turns out that when you’re in multiple cursors you can narrow the view to just those lines having a cursor. That’s something I didn’t know.

All you need do is turn on hide-unmatched-lines-mode. You can do that by typing 【Ctrl+'】. This is nice because it eliminates a lot of clutter and allows you to concentrate on the text you’re changing. Where is really shines, though, is with a large buffer where you normally wouldn’t be able to see all the cursors.

Actually, hide-unmatched-lines-mode will provide some context—2 lines above and below each cursor, by default—but, of course, you can configure that. This is another great enhancement to one of my favorite packages. Another gift from Magnar Sveen.

If you took my advice and starting following (or emacs you’ll be familiar with abo-abo’s hydra package. It started out as a relatively simple macro, def-rep-command, that allows a command with a prefix to be repeated by merely pressing the last key. That got a lot of favorable attention so he refactored it into an ELPA package.

Then Sacha picked it up and made a small enhancement that allowed her to use it to control window switching. Since then, abo-abo has made continuous enhancements to the package making it a very flexible tool. Now abo-abo has produced a video that demonstrates its power. The video shows hydra being used for a variety of different tasks and will be sure to give you some ideas.

If you follow the link above, it will take you to a post by abo-abo that, in turn, has a link to the video. It also shows the current version of his window switching code. You’ll see that it now handles most of usual window handling chores including calling ido for another buffer and loading frequently used files with a single key by bookmark+. You can also call executable code so it has about the same power as John Kitchin’s Emacs/Helm hotspots setup that I wrote about previously.

I have to say that I’m really tempted by this. It seems like a nice way of loading frequently used files and switching between, swapping, and deleting windows. It has the advantage over Kitchin’s solution of loading hydra, which can be useful for other chores. On the other hand, the same can be said of Helm. A fine example of Buridan’s ass.

John Kitchin, who in addition to being a professor with all the work that that entails, has been busy showing us how to leverage Emacs to ease our work flows. If you’re a helm user, Kitchin has some nice Elisp that makes it easy to go wherever he needs to go for his normal tasks.

That includes things like reading email, his elfeed feed, his calendar, and so on. He has shortcuts to all his frequently used files as well as his recently used files.

The amazing thing about the code is how simple it is. If you steal it, you’ll want to adjust it for your particular work flow but the simplicity of the code should make that easy for anyone with even modest Elisp skills.

I do a lot of this with bookmarks (which Kitchin also handles) and by just leaving my frequently used files in buffers. If I had helm installed, I’d have already stolen his code. It might be enough to get me to embrace helm. I hear nothing but good things about it but ido and smex are working well for me and seem natural by now. I’d be happy to hear from anyone who has some wisdom on the matter. Leave a comment. It’s free.

Recently, Sacha Chua wrote about how she leveraged abo-abo’s def-repeat-command to easily call windmove and ace-window. She bound the function to the prefix key-chord of yy. That seemed an odd choice to me but I just shrugged and moved on.

Now it appears that she was on to something. John Cook has a nice post that looks at rare bigrams to use as a key-chord. The idea is that if you choose a rare combination, you’re less likely to activate a key-chord by mistake. As it happens, yy is one of those rare combinations making it a perfect prefix for her window switching commands. I use a QWERTY keyboard so yy has the additional advantage of being easy to type even though it’s not on the home row. I know Chua uses a Dvorak keyboard but that has y in roughly the same place so, again, it’s a win for ease of typing.

I have no idea whether Chua was aware that yy is a rare combination, used her intuition that it wasn’t very likely, or just chose a random key-chord but it turned out to be an excellent choice. If you like using key-chords, take a look at Cook’s post for some ideas on which ones are apt to keep you out of trouble.