Emacs stuff I always seem to forget

Posted on January 7, 2009

Here are three Emacs tips that I seem to have a hard time remembering. I’m posting them here to help them stick to my brain.

Align

Emacs has a number of powerful align commands, but most times the following incantation will suffice to magically align text into neat columns:

C-u M-x align

Repeat

I don’t know how I manage to forget this handy helper, but I do. The following will repeat the most-recently executed command:

C-x z

Continue hitting “z” to continue repeating.

Recursive edit

While you are in the middle of doing something in Emacs, such as a query-replace-regexp, you can put that something on hold, do some editing, and then return to what you were doing. This maneuver is accomplished with Recursive Editing. In short:

C-r (enter recursive edit)
C-M-c (exit recursive edit)
C-] (abort: exit all nested recursive-edit sessions)