Anchored Transpose

Thanks to Tim Stewart, I stumbled across the anchored-transpose package. You can think of it as a generalization of the other transpose functions such as transpose-chars, transpose-words, transpose-sexps, and the other less used transposition functions. Instead of transposing around the point, anchored-transpose lets you specify an arbitrary anchor region to pivot around.

Here’s an example of its use: suppose I have

First DO this and then do that.

and I want

First do that and then DO this.

To do that

1. Select a region that covers the things you want to swap and everything in between.
2. Call anchored-transpose.
3. Select the anchor region. That is everything in between what you want to transpose.
4. Call anchored-transpose again.

For our example, we first select the region

DO this and then do that

and call anchored-transpose. Then select

and then

and call anchored-transpose again.

You can also swap two disjoint regions by selecting one, calling anchored-transpose, selecting the other, and calling anchored-transpose again. You can specify the two regions in any order. You can also select the entire phrase and anchor phrase in the first example in either order.

I often want to swap parts of a sentence or even several sentences so anchored-transpose is a real win for me. I’ve mapped it to 【Hyper+t】 to make it easy to call.

You can get anchored-transpose from Melpa.