When I find a useful Emacs package or tip, I almost always write about it so others can take advantage of them too. The other day I was using one of those packages and thought, \u201cGee, this is really neat. Everybody should be using it.\u201d That coupled with the fact that I keep seeing posts or tweets asking about how to do some of these things made me think that it would be worth revisiting some of them. These tips\/packages are ones that I use almost everyday and wouldn’t want to live without. <\/p>\n
Without further ado, here’s a list of tips\/packages that I find very useful along with the original Irreal post that discussed them: <\/p>\n
zap-to-char<\/code> is useful but then go on to complain that it should really zap up to<\/i> the character. It turns out that there’s already an Emacs function that lets you Zap Up To A Character<\/a>. Read the post to see how to enable it.<\/li>\n- \n
We all know about \u3010Ctrl<\/kbd>+h<\/kbd> f<\/kbd>\u3011 and \u3010Ctrl<\/kbd>+h<\/kbd> k<\/kbd>\u3011 to bring up documentation about a specified function or a function bound to a key. One of Irreal’s frequent commenters, Phil, notes that you can also bring up the source for those functions too (Help From Phil<\/a>) using the functions: <\/p>\n\nfind-function<\/code><\/li>\nfind-function-on-key<\/code><\/li>\nfind-variable<\/code><\/li>\nfind-library<\/code><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n I bind these to the keys corresponding to the documentation functions but with the letter after the \u3010Ctrl<\/kbd>+h<\/kbd>\u3011 modified with \u3010Ctrl<\/kbd>\u3011 so that find-function<\/code>, for example, is bound to the \u3010Ctrl<\/kbd>+h<\/kbd> Ctrl<\/kbd>+f<\/kbd>\u3011 shortcut. <\/p>\n<\/li>\n- \n
A trick I learned from Tim Visher is evaluating an sexp in an Emacs buffer and replacing the sexp by the result. I wrote about that and the code I used to accomplish it in Eval and Replace in Emacs<\/a>. I’ve since replaced the code with
<\/p>\n\n;; <\/span>From Lars Tveito: https:\/\/github.com\/larstvei\/dot-emacs\/blob\/master\/init.org<\/span>\n;; <\/span>This avoids overloading C-c C-e in org-mode<\/span>\n(defadvice<\/span> eval-last-sexp<\/span> (around replace-sexp (arg) activate)\n \"Evaluate and replace when called with a prefix argument.\"<\/span>\n (if<\/span> arg\n (let<\/span> ((pos (point)))\n ad-do-it\n (goto-char pos)\n (backward-kill-sexp)\n (forward-sexp))\n ad-do-it))\n<\/pre>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n- From one of Sacha’s chats, Sacha Chats with Steve Purcell<\/a>, I learned about one of the most useful packages I have:
whole-line-or-region<\/code>. It lets you use certain commands, like \u3010Meta<\/kbd>+w<\/kbd>\u3011 that normally work on a region, on the entire current line if no region is defined. I can’t tell you how useful this is. I use it every single day including several times in writing this post.<\/li>\n- I often want to do a
ping<\/code> or traceroute<\/code> and used to switch to a terminal to run them. Then I found out about the Emacs Net Utilities<\/a> that lets me run them from within Emacs. Later I improved that a bit by making them run in a temporary screen: Running Ping in Emacs<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n I hope you find some or all of these tips\/packages as useful as I do. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I find a useful Emacs package or tip, I almost always write about it so others can take advantage of them too. The other day I was using one of those packages and thought, \u201cGee, this is really neat. … Continue reading