Being a full-time Emacs user for some years now I’ve gotten accustomed to many packages offered by the community that greatly enhance Emacs’ text editing capabilities. The thing is that Emacs’ only lacks a good editor, or is that so? Here are some packages I’ve stopped using in favor of built-in functionality that I’ve discovered recently.
expand-region.el - Default marking keybindings
Expand region is a wonderful package by Magnar Sveen of dash.el, s.el and multiple-cursors.el fame. It is indeed very useful because it creates regions by expanding the semantics of a region. So in practice it would mark a word, then a sentence, then a paragraph so on.
The thing is I was somewhat bothered by the fact that I needed to continually expand the region till it got what I wanted. So I decided to invest time to learn the default Emacs’s’ marking system which seems to be a better fit for me:
- M-@ marks a word
- M-h marks a paragraph
- C-M-@ marks a balanced expression or s-expression
- C-M-h marks a defun (top-level-definition)
- C-x h marks the whole buffer
Since these semantics are enough for my needs, and the keybindings are somewhat consistent with the M- works on word level, C-M- on sexps and defuns paradigm of moving keybindings I am quite happy with them.
yasnippet - Abbrev
Yasnippet is a well known package used to create templates for mostly anything that has boilerplate. The native Emacs’s’ solution to the same problem is Abbrev. Though not as powerful as yasnippet, with the major advantage of yasnippet being that you can control point position after an expansion something that Abbrev can’t. On the other hand Abbrev suggests a workflow that really suits my own. If you recognize you write something a lot you can instantly save it as an abbrev by C-x a g for a global or C-x a l for a local (defined by major-mode of the buffer). All in all since my use of snippets is not that extensive, Abbrev mode seems to cover my needs almost fully.
Any folding mode – Hideshow
So I haven’t really tried any of the folding modes for Emacs’, mainly because this article was spawned by me wanting to try some of them and then discovering hs-mode that is bundled with Emacs. So hideshow can fold blocks in most programming languages and can be expanded to work on more if they have some sane structure in the form of begin/end blocks. It works really fine, can be enable with M-x hs-minor-mode and then has some of the worst keybindings that I have ever encountered. They are bad even by Emacs’ standards:
- C-c @ C-c Toggle block.
- C-c @ C-a Show all.
- C-c @ C-t Hide all.
If you happen to try hs-mode, do yourself a favor and change them! Also by S-mouse-2 (often meaning middle click) you can toggle blocks.
Interesting discoveries
Some features that seem useful and I discovered recently:
- C-x C-o deletes all but one consecutive blank lines, neat!
- M-s M-w searches for the marked region in the Web.
- M-$ checks the word’s under point spelling, or checks a region if there is one.
- C-M-t transposes two balanced expressions.
- You can change case of a region with C-x C-l or C-x C-u.
- M-% (query-replace) also works in a region there is one, else works on the whole buffer.
- You can always be an edgy 14-year old on 00’s MySpace by running M-x studlify-buffer!