There’s an interesting blog post by bendersteed that discusses the power of vanilla Emacs. Emacs, he says, has a lot of useful packages but we shouldn’t underestimate the power of built-in commands that have nearly the same function. He notes, for example, that Magnar Sveen’s expand-region is a wonderful package but Emacs offers at set of commands (Meta+@, Meta+h, Ctrl+Meta+@, Ctrl+Meta+h, and Ctrl+x h) that do pretty much the same thing. Likewise, abbrev can perform many of the functions that yasnippet is often used for.
You may or may not be convinced to give up expand-region and yasnippet but bendersteed’s post is useful for two reasons. First, it serves as a reminder of that built-in functionality, which, in some circumstances, may be more appropriate than invoking the package and second, he’s got a nice section at the end of the post that lists some of the built-in functionality that he’s discovered. Two and a half years ago, I wrote about eww-search-words, which will search the Web for the highlighted region. I’d pretty much forgotten about it and that’s a shame because it’s really useful for checking a word that doesn’t appear in whatever local dictionary you’re using. It was nice to be reminded of it. That alone makes the post worth reading.