Irreal

Just a quickie today. Bhaskar Chowdhury has a short video (6 minutes, 54 seconds) that describes 4 vital Emacs shortcuts. Three of them are probably already in your repertoire:

• switch-to-buffer (Ctrl+x b)
• async-shell-command (Meta+&)
• shell-command (Meta+!)

Most of you probably use those all the time. The last is something I didn’t know about. If you’re an Ivy user, there’s the counsel-switch-buffer command. Its like switch-to-buffer except that as you scroll down the list of buffers, the buffer at point is displayed in the current window so you can see its content. That can be handy, especially if you have many buffers open at a time.

The counsel-switch-buffer command is not bound by default so if you kike it you will either have to find a binding for it or simply steal the Ctrl+x b binding for it. You probably don’t want to use Ctrl+b as Chowdhury does since it’s an important cursor movement chord.

Torstein Johansen, who’s been using Emacs for 20 years, has a shocking confession: Although he learned about them, he’s never used keyboard macros. Part of the reason for that, he says, is that he uses multiple cursors instead. My first impression was, “But multiple cursors was just introduced 3 or four years ago.” Actually, Sveen’s famous Emacs Rocks! video on multiple cursors was 10 years ago so it’s more than possible that lots of people have always used it in preference to keyboard macros.

Regardless, Johansen set out to remedy the situation by getting serious about macros and recording a short video on how to use them. The video uses macros to solve a simple reformatting problem and then solves the same problem with multiple cursors for comparison. The amount of work is pretty much the same—especially if use the repeat macro to end of buffer command instead of repeating it for each line—but multiple cursors does take a few less keystrokes.

The video illustrates a problem with multiple cursors that I mentioned in my Are Multiple Cursors Suboptimal? post: there are several commands devoted to placing the initial cursors that you have to know whereas you can do real work with keyboard macros by just knowing how to start and end the macro recording. I like the F3 and F4 keystrokes for that especially since F4 will replay the macro after it’s been recorded.

All in all, the video is a nice introduction to using keyboard macros and it’s short (3 min, 31 secs) so there will be no problem finding time for it. The video does not cover everything you can do with macros but just knowing the simple commands Johansen illustrates will cover 90% of everything you want to do.

Good news for all Emacsers who have a copy of Mickey Petersen’s excellent Mastering Emacs: Mickey has updated the book to cover Emacs 28. You can read the “2022 Edition Update” section of the book at the previous link but the TL;DR is that the big change is, of course, native compilation and that Emacs 28 otherwise consists of incremental changes to many aspects of Emacs. You can read the section or Mickey’s longer treatise on what’s new in Emacs 28 for details.

If you currently own the book, you’ve probably already received an email from Mickey alerting you to the update. You can get the update for free by using the secure link for updating that you originally used to get the book and subsequent updates.

If you don’t yet own a copy, now’s a good time to get one. You can buy it for only $28.79 at the Mastering Emacs site. It’s a great book and one every Emacs user should have.

I’ve written about this many times before but it’s so useful it bears repeating. It’s about a technique I use all the time and one that I’m sure the rest of you will find worthwhile too. This post is inspired by one from Alain Lafon, a master Emacs user, about whom I’ve written several times.

The idea is simple. If you’re an Emacs user and want to rename a file, the easiest way to do that is to use dired from within Emacs. But what if you want to rename several, similarly named files? The answer is the same except that you have to turn on wdired mode (Ctrl+x Ctrl+q by default). Once you’ve entered wdired mode, the changes you make to the dired listing are reflected back to the actual files. So all you have to do is turn on wdired mode and use your favorite search replace method to change the target file names. Then you simply type Ctrl+c Ctrl+c to exit wdired mode and rename the files.

Lafon’s post has an animated GIF that demonstrates the process but the easiest way to see how it works is to try it out yourself. It really is a trick worth knowing.