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The single most useful Emacs feature

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Re: The single most useful Emacs feature

#81
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not exactly luck. Until today this question hasn't been active since 2009, when opened-ended questions were permitted. Now that it's been bumped it'll be closed shortly.

Closed now. I'm actually surprised that someone hasn't gone through all the older questions looking for stuff to close, given how rigid their mods tend to be.

The moderation is lazily-evaluated on-demand. Before today it was just a moderation thunk.

Re: The single most useful Emacs feature

#84
post #56

The kill ring. I would marry the kill ring and have its babies. Why have other editors not adopted this? Have they?

As best I understand the emacs functionality, vim's numbered registers are its analogue: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/change.html#registers.

Re: The single most useful Emacs feature

#87
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less cynically, Stack Overflow is about specific answers to specific questions. Any question broad enough to be interesting to a site like Hacker News is too broad for Stack Overflow, apparently.

Makes sense, but it's insane. More general answers are more generally useful than specific ones, by definition.

Not always. The only question that the linked StackOverflow page can answer is "What Emacs features did a self-selecting set of StackOverflow users find particularly useful as of early December 2011". While it's quite possible that somebody might someday want that very specific piece of information, I can't blame Joel and Jeff for preferring that particular database-space had been used to record a workaround or explanation for some uncommon error message.

Re: The single most useful Emacs feature

#88
post #45

record and play macro (someone had to mention) C-x ( C-x ) C-x e M-x 99 C-x e (play macro 99 times)

Also note that C-u 0 C-x e plays the macro until it rings the bell (e.g. runs out of buffer space or tries to forward-search for a name that doesn't exist. This is great when you don't know how many times it needs to be run.

^ This. super-useful under appreciated keyboard macro feature.

Re: The single most useful Emacs feature

#89
post #56

The kill ring. I would marry the kill ring and have its babies. Why have other editors not adopted this? Have they?

I haven't used Emacs, but I've worked with people who have, and the one thing that made me think 'wow' was this. So many times have I yanked something, deleted some white space or some such, and then lost it.

If (like me) you are a Vim user, there is a plugin to replicate this functionality called YankRing. Highly recommended! http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1234

Re: The single most useful Emacs feature

#90
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish the Windows Clipboard would implement a version of the kill ring. I really, really hate not having previous cuts and copies available. As a rather clumsy work-around I keep an emacs scratch file open on my task bar and copy stuff I might need more than once to it.

Same with the Mac clipboard.

The pro version of Alfred has this functionality built in: http://www.alfredapp.com/powerpack/
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