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Thursday, January 15, 2009

ibuffers - always something new.

One of the wonderful things with using such a huge and rich environment as Emacs (yes, an envorinment!) is that there is always something new to learn or to use.

Today I happened to wander over to Xah Lee's pages and discovered something called ibuffers. Wonderful interface to the often huge amounts of buffers one might have open in emacs at any one time. And to make it the default list-buffers C-x C-b commans merely define an alias for it

(defalias 'list-buffers 'ibuffer)

You can stack filters based on mode, mark buffers, operate on buffers etc. This is combination with my default C-x b command ido-switch-buffer makes for some powerful uber-geek buffer manipulation and selection.

Xah Lee is an interesting character. My advice is hear him out - he knows emacs back to front but can often appear somewhat reactionary and sharp in the face of criticism from some of the old school emacs users who, to be fair, do not take kindly to young guns criticising Emacs and the design decisions they have taken to get it where it is today. Personally I do believe that the "out of the box" Emacs could and should have a lot more user friendly defaults - the seasoned users that this offends should be more than able to reconfigure it to how they like it. Heresy I know. And thank god burning at the stake is now outlawed ....

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