Back in January, John D. Cook wrote an excellent post on the ways you can use regular expressions in Emacs. You’re probably familiar with most of them but there might be a couple of surprises in his list.
He looks at five main categories:
- Searching and replacing
- Purging line
- Aligning code
- Directory editing
- Miscellaneous
but most of those consider several commands.
The use of regular expressions is endemic in Emacs. As Cook note, 15% of the pages in the Emacs manual mention them. Emacs regular expressions are often criticized for non-standard syntax and a lack of features but you certainly can’t complain that Emacs doesn’t make wide and appropriate use of them.