Irreal

Back in January of 2015, I wrote about an excellent post from abo-abo on his refactoring workflow. If you haven’t read his post be sure to take a few minutes to read it. The basic idea was that he wanted to change all occurrences of an identifier in all files in a given directory. He does that by finding each occurrence with rgrep, making the rgrep result buffer writable with wgrep, then using iedit to change all occurrences at once.

Samuel Barreto has a similar workflow that uses counsel-ag. He uses the evil substitution command rather than iedit to make his change but that’s a detail. Take a look at his post for the details. If you’re using ag or looking for a reason to install it, his workflow is very appealing. I wouldn’t be surprised if abo-abo is using it himself now. If you often find yourself making this sort of global change, you really need to check out these workflows.

Grant over at Wisdom and Wonder has a short post that points us to imenu-list. That’s a minor mode that puts the output of imenu into a separate buffer where you may find it easier to work with. If you follow the link to imenu-list‘s GitHub page you can see a screen shot of it in action.

Somehow, I’ve never warmed up to imenu but perhaps this will help. You can think of imenu-list as being sort of like occur and use it in a similar way. If you find yourself jumping around a program buffer a lot, you may want to give imenu-list a try.

If you have files that you read in eww, here’s a suggestion that might make your workflow a bit easier:

(define-key dired-mode-map "e" (lambda () (interactive) (eww-open-file (dired-get-file-for-visit)))) e opens from #dired with #eww in #emacs

— ε (@goaoio) July 21, 2016

Mike Zamansky has another video up in his Using Emacs Series. This time it’s about keyboard macros. I’m always inclined to think that everyone knows all about them but I keep reading tweets about people discovering their power and being amazed so Zamansky’s video is apt to be useful for many people.

If you aren’t using keyboard macros, you’re almost certainly working too hard. Zamansky gives a couple of examples that show how macros can make quick work of repetitive tasks. Often you can accomplish these tasks with something like multiple-cursors but keyboard macros are built in and always available. Zamansky compares them to a Leatherman but I like the Swiss Army Knife analogy better. In either case, the point is that macros are a flexible and powerful tool to quickly get things done. As Zamansky says, there might be a better tool for a particular task but macros are almost always good enough.

Take a look at the video to see a few more tricks like counters and saving macros. The only thing I would add is that the ability to repeat the macro a fixed number of times or until the end of the buffer is often useful. On the other hand, as Zamansky says, usually it’s just as easy to manually repeat the macro the required number of times.

As usual, the video is short—11:31 (min:sec)—so it should be easy to find time to watch it.