Irreal

I stumbled across this Emacs survival card, which I hadn’t seen before. It’s very much like the Emacs Reference Card but seems more useful to me. Of course, you may disagree but it’s worth taking a look at it to see if you find it useful.

I don’t print out cheat sheets anymore but I do bookmark them for those occasions when I need a quick reference. I will definitely be bookmarking the survival card. At least on my Mac, survival.pdf is included with Emacs so I can use it offline and I automatically keep it up to date as I compile and install new Emacs versions.

I was looking at some old Irreal posts and stumbled across this post. It’s something that I’d completely forgotten about so I thought it would be worthwhile pointing to it again.

The TL;DR is that when using Magnar Sveen’s excellent Multiple Cursors you can narrow to the matched lines (and a little context) by calling mc-hide-unmatched-lines-mode. It’s really handy when the targets are spread out in a larger buffer because you can see all (or at least more) of the targets on the screen. Take a look at the original post for the details.

As part of his Emacs mini manual series, tuhdo introduces an interesting idea for quickly looking at, say, a function definition. There are lots of ways of doing that, of course, and tuhdo isn’t advocating any particular one or eve a new one. Rather, you can think of his suggestion as providing a framework for quick-look systems.

To understand what that means, you first have to understand what tuhdo sees as the problem with the way current systems work. Some of them pop up a little subwindow with the required definition but the space is delimited and there’s probably no font locking or other amenities that we’re used to having with buffers. Others open a new buffer either in the same or another window. That can also be annoying even if it opens the new buffer in a different window because that window may also hold useful information that you want to see. Finally, a long string of nested such lookups can mean that you lose your place and have to search for your original buffer.

Tuhdo’s idea is to pop up a new frame positioned right under the symbol at point, use whatever quick-look mechanism you prefer—his demo uses the rtags-find-symbol-at-point function—and display that definition in a buffer in the new frame. That means the “popup” has all the capabilities of a normal buffer and it’s easy to nest calls without losing your way. You merely delete the frames to unwind the calls in a natural way.

Take a look his demo at the link. It makes all this clear and shows how natural and easy it is to use. It doesn’t take much code to do this. Tuhdo shows the code for using rtags, which you can just cut and paste into your init.el. If you use some other system, it should be easy to adapt.

Here’s a useful reminder from Wilfred Hughes:

M-x imenu: lists all the functions, classes and top-level variables in a file. Great for getting an overview, or for jumping around.

Works in pretty much every language too! pic.twitter.com/kibmFD2y8N

— Ⓔ Command of the Day (@ecotd) January 1, 2018

I say “useful reminder” because—at least for me—it’s easy to forget about it. That’s true even though I have it bound to an easy keystroke, Ctrl+..

I originally set it up to make package configurations in my init.el easy to find but it’s actually handy for navigating in most languages. It gives you a list of functions and top level variables and, if you do such things, classes. When combined with counsel-imenu you get a nice Ivy-like list of candidates that you can successfully refine to narrow in on exactly what you’re looking for.

The reason that I often forget to use it is that swiper is so powerful that it’s my automatic go-to-tool when I’m looking for something in a file. That’s true even if I just want to glance at it and not necessarily move to it. Still, imenu is useful and gives a nice overview of what’s going on in a source file. It’s worth trying to remember to use it.