Bozhidar Batsov over at the excellent Emacs Redux has a particularly good tip on improving move-beginning-of-line (mapped to 【Ctrl+a】 by default) so that it moves first to the leading non-blank character of the line and then to the absolute beginning of line on the second consecutive call. As soon as I saw it I knew I would be adding it to my init.el.
Batsov implemented it with a function that calls back-to-indentation and move-beginning-of-line as needed. He remarked that it could also be done by advising move-beginning-of-line. Just for kicks, I implemented it with defadvice. Here, for those of you who are interested, is that implementation:
(defadvice move-beginning-of-line (around smarter-bol activate) ;; Move to requested line if needed. (let ((arg (or (ad-get-arg 0) 1))) (when (/= arg 1) (forward-line (1- arg)))) ;; Move to indentation on first call, then to actual BOL on second. (let ((pos (point))) (back-to-indentation) (when (= pos (point)) ad-do-it)))
Either way is fine so grab whichever appeals to you most. I can’t see how anyone wouldn’t want this (unless your Emacs use case is very different from normal). And for goodness sake, subscribe to Emacs Redux if you haven’t already. Batsov has a ton of great tips delivered almost daily.