Charles Choi has another great addition to his Casual Suite. This time it’s an interface to the re-builder command. There are two things that everyone agrees about Emacs regular expressions:
- They’re very powerful and useful
- They have an arcane syntax and are hard to use
Well really, they’re not that much different from other RE syntaxes but there is enough difference to make using them harder than it should be. Indeed, many folks who everyone would agree are master Emacs users constantly bemoan the RE syntax and wish it were replaced with something else such as Perl Compatible REs.
Happily, there’s a tool, re-builder, that can help. I’ve written about it here and here. Unhappily, I find it really hard to use. Finding a good regexp is easy enough but it’s hard to remember how to export that regexp for use in your code or the current command.
That’s where Choi’s Casual RE-builder comes in. Like other members of the Casual Suite, when you need to remember some of the arcane commands, you can simply invoke a handy transient menu to remind you.
As much as I like re-builder, I almost never use it because I can never remember how to export the resulting regexp to where I need it. Choi’s RE-builder solves this problem and, to my mind, increases the utility of re-builder a great deal.
If you have troubles with Emacs regexs or have found re-builder too hard to use, you should take a look at Choi’s RE-builder app.