Today was a good Emacs day. I learned something new. Over at Ray on Emacs, Raymond Zeitler has a very nice post on using zap-to-char in reverse. He—hypothetically—was typing some text, inadvertently leaned on a key, and ended up with a long string of a repeated character at the end of his text. Something like this:
senteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Here’s what I didn’t know. You can cause zap-to-char to delete characters to the left by giving it negative count argument. So in Zeitler’s example, he erases the string of es by calling zap-to-char as Meta+- Meta+z t.
But that’s not quite right. The problem is that it will also erase the t, which I assume was not his intention. Fortunately, there’s an easy solution that I wrote about almost 14 years ago. The problem with zap-to-char is that it does what you want it to only about half the time. The rest of the time you don’t want to delete the target character; you want to delete up to but not including that character. It turns out that Emacs has a command, zap-up-to-char, to do that but it’s not bound to any shortcut1. I have it bound to Meta+Z. It also honors the negative count argument so the correct solution for Zeitler’s problem is Meta+- Meta+Z t.
The mistake aside, this is a great post because it tells me—and maybe you—something I didn’t know: you can zap backwards.
Footnotes:
Happily, it’s now autoloaded by default so you no longer have to worry about that.