Karthik Chikmagalur is back with another post in his Batteries Included with Emacs series. This post, More Batteries Included with Emacs, is the second and last of his posts on little known features of vanilla Emacs. His first post in the series lists commands some of which I knew about and use or some useful ones that I didn’t know about.
Many of the commands in his latest post are ones that I didn’t know about and probably wouldn’t want to use. For example, I have no interest at all in controlling Emacs with gestures. Who even knew you could do such a thing? When I’m in Emacs, which is most of the time, I stay away from the mouse entirely. Still, some may find it useful so take a look.
I also have no interest in having a speedbar although I know it’s a popular feature for many. I theoretically like the idea of the regular expression builder but hardly ever use it.
Chikmagalur lists several commands that sort of function like ido and Ivy but I’m a confirmed Ivy/Swapper/Counsel user so these hold no interest for me. If you’re trying to limit the number of packages you have installed, you may find their functionality useful as they do provide some completions—even fuzzy completions—that make invoking commands much easier.
He also reminded me of the extended rectangle commands that are part of the CUA mode. I used to use them all the time but fell out of the habit for some reason. Chikmagalur notes that they don’t play well with undo-tree so perhaps that’s why.
Chikmagalur’s post once again puts the lie to the often heard complaint that Emacs is unusable out-of-the-box. As he shows, there’s a lot of functionality there that even experienced users are not aware of. You should definitely take a look at both posts.