In a nice coda to yesterday’s post on Sacha Chua’s solution for entering number ranges, 0-_-0_ points out that a solution already exists. That solution is abo-abo’s tiny library. I vaguely remember seeing tiny when abo-abo released it 13 years ago but I never followed up and used it. Still, anything from abo-abo is worth taking a look at and, in any event, we now have two solutions to the problem.
Abo-abo’s solution brings to mind another Emacs lesson: very often, if you need some functionality, there’s a good chance that it already exists. Of course, that’s not the same as being easily discoverable. An internal function can usually be discovered through the on-line documentation but a third party library like tiny won’t appear in that documentation until it’s loaded.
That’s it for today. I just wanted to tell the rest of the story from yesterday.