Hippie Expand

Over at Mastering Emacs, Mickey has a nice post on one of Emacs’ hidden gems: hippie expand. The odd thing is that although it is the most capable expander built into Emacs, it does not have a default binding. As Mickey points out, its much less versatile cousin, dynamic abbrev does have a binding but hippie expand does everything it does so there’s no reason to bother with it.

Mickey suggests remapping the binding for dynamic abbrev to hippie expand since it’s unlikely Emacs will ever change the current default. Of course, that’s part of the power of Emacs: you don’t have to put up with the way things are; you can change them to suit yourself.

I’ve been using hippie expand for years and have it bound to Meta+Tab, which seems natural to me for a completion mechanism. Dynamic abbrev is bound to Meta+/, which isn’t as natural but may be easier to type. After reading Mickey’s post I’m going to remap Meta+/ to hippie expand and see if I like it. Of course, Meta+Tab is burned into my muscle memory so I’ll probably forget to use it.

In any event, be sure to take a couple of minutes to read Mickey’s post. As usual it’s well written, informative, and well worth your time.

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