Charles Choi is back with a new member of his Casual suite. His Casual suite, in case you don’t know, is a collection of transient based menus to make dealing with Emacs major modes and subsystems easier. Choi’s latest addition is for the ibuffer major mode. If you’re like me, you know exactly two commands for this. The first is to change to a named buffer (Ctrl+x b) and the second is to bring up a list of all the active buffers (Ctrl+x Ctrl+b).
Once you have the list of buffers (the ibuffer list), you’re probably aware that you can do some operations on it but, again if you’re like me, you know only a couple of them. One of the things I learned from Choi’s post is that are an astounding 132 commands available in the ibuffer listing. Who knew.
With that many commands, there’s virtually no chance of remembering them all. That’s where Casual Ibuffer comes in. As with the other Casual apps, it doesn’t try to cover every single command but provide easy access to those you’re most likely to use.
As I said, I always thought of the ibuffer list as simply a list and had no idea of all the hidden functionality hiding in it. Just reading through Choi’s announcement will show you how wrong that idea is. The real value, though, is opening our—or at least my—eyes to a whole new set of powerful commands for dealing with buffers, which are, after all, the fundamental Emacs construct.