[comp.emacs] Buffer handling in GNU Emacs 18.55

irw@stl.stc.co.uk (Ian Woollard) (12/11/90)

Multiple buffer handling in Emacs has always struck me as a little bit clumsy,
albeit fully functional.

I frequently have a lot of buffers which have long, similar names... Pressing
the complete keys <spc> and <tab> get me there, ... eventually.

What I want to do is to be able to flip quickly between several buffers,
without having to rename them to something short, or have to go to the buffer
menu. I don't know of any built in mechanism for this in Emacs.

Suggestions:

a) have a way of rotating the buffer list, in either direction.
b) have a way of completing buffer names that makes guesses as to what I mean
c) have a method of iconifying buffers (or something like this)
d) have another mark that I can put on a buffer, so that I can bind a key to
find that buffer

Of this a) is the simplest, in fact Emacs can nearly do this with
'bury-buffer' command, but as far as I know there is no command to
'unbury-buffer'.

b) Would also be extremely good idea, but a lot harder...

I've never done a line of lisp in my life, I tried doing a) as a keyboard
macro but failed.

Anybody ever done this? Or done any other thing like this?

-Ian.

manderso@spain.mpr.ca (Mark Anderson) (12/12/90)

In article <3848@stl.stc.co.uk>
"Ian Woollard" <irw@stl.stc.co.uk> writes:
>What I want to do is to be able to flip quickly between several buffers,
[...]
>a) have a way of rotating the buffer list, in either direction.
[...]
>Of this a) is the simplest, in fact Emacs can nearly do this with
>'bury-buffer' command, but as far as I know there is no command to
>'unbury-buffer'.

(defun unbury-buffer ()
  "Switch to the last buffer in the buffer list."
  (interactive)
  (switch-to-buffer
   (nth (1- (length (buffer-list))) (buffer-list))))

I have bury-buffer and unbury-buffer bound to adjacent function keys,
making it easy to cycle through the buffer list.  Oh, and you might like
M-x electric-buffer-list.
-- 
Mark Anderson
manderso@mprgate.mpr.ca

Mike.Williams@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Mike Williams) (12/12/90)

+-- In article <3848@stl.stc.co.uk> irw@stl.stc.co.uk (Ian Woollard) writes:
| 
| What I want to do is to be able to flip quickly between several buffers,
| without having to rename them to something short, or have to go to the buffer
| menu. I don't know of any built in mechanism for this in Emacs.
| 
| Suggestions:
| 
| a) have a way of rotating the buffer list, in either direction.

    A number of people have posted solutions to this in the past, the
  simplest being binding two keys to \\[bury-buffer] and
  \\[switch-to-buffer] respectively.  I have a slightly bulkier package,
  which pops up a list of buffers as it rotates.  I'll post it to
  gnu.emacs.sources in the next couple of days.  (If you don't get the gnu
  groups, let me know and I'll email you a copy). 

| b) have a way of completing buffer names that makes guesses as to what I
|    mean

    It sounds like you need Dave Gillespie's partial-completion package,
  which will attempt to "guess what you mean" when completing buffer names,
  file names, elisp symbols, etc. in the minibuffer.  You can FTP
  partial-comp.el from the Elisp archive at ohio-state.

  partial-comp (1.04) David Gillespie, <daveg@csvax.caltech.edu>
    Address:  	tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
    Directory:	pub/gnu/emacs/elisp-archive/packages
    File:     	partial-comp.el.Z

--
      /-------------------- byrd@comp.vuw.ac.nz --------------------\ 
      | Mike Williams, Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa. |
      \-------- Yesterday, I ... no, wait, that wasn't me. ---------/

himacdon@maytag.uwaterloo.ca (Hamish Macdonald) (12/13/90)

>>>>> In article <3848@stl.stc.co.uk>, irw@stl.stc.co.uk (Ian Woollard) writes:

Ian> [...]
Ian> a) have a way of rotating the buffer list, in either direction.
Ian> [...]

I have a set of functions which allows you to rotate through a list of
interesting buffers, where a buffer is uninteresting if its name
matches a regexp of uninteresting buffer names.

It is actually a bit more complicated than this.  If anybody is
interested, send me mail, and I can mail it or post it to
gnu.emacs.sources.

Hamish.
--
--------------------------------------------------------------------
himacdon@maytag.uwaterloo.ca                 watmath!maytag!himacdon