Making deleted files go to the trash can
In Emacs 23.1 support for your operating system’s trash can (or recycle bin, or whatever) was added. File deletions in Emacs now uses your system’s trash can and the deleted files will be put there...
View ArticleMake script files executable automatically
You can force Emacs to make a file executable (respecting your umask settings) if Emacs considers it a script. To determine if it is a script, Emacs will look for the hash-bang notation in the file and...
View ArticleFind files faster with the recent files package
I bet the majority of files you edit on a day-to-day basis are the same ones over, and over again. For that reason I recommend you use Emacs’s recentf package, it is a great — and very sophisticated,...
View ArticleHow to mark a buffer as “not modified”
You can tell Emacs to set a buffer as not modified (even though it may well be) by pressing M-~, also bound to M-x not-modified. This will obviously suppress any save prompts for that file — at least...
View ArticleWhat’s New in Emacs 23.3
Update 10/3/11: Emacs 23.3 is officially out Emacs 23.3 is out now. Get the source archives here or the compiled Windows binaries here. What’s New in Emacs 23.3 Here’s a few interesting changes. The...
View ArticleWorking with multiple files in dired
Here’s another frequent workflow question that needs answering: How do you work on/with multiple files in bulk, and what if the files you want to edit are split over multiple directories? The simplest...
View ArticleWhat’s New in Emacs 24 (part 2)
This is part two of my What’s New in Emacs 24 series. Part one. Trash changes `delete-by-moving-to-trash’ now only affects commands that specify trashing. This avoids inadvertently trashing temporary...
View ArticleCompiling and running scripts in Emacs
I’ve talked about running shells and executing shell commands in Emacs before, but that’s mostly used for ad hoc commands or spelunking; what if you want to compile or run your scripts, code or unit...
View ArticleWDired: Editable Dired Buffers
A long while ago I wrote an article about Working with Multiple files in Dired. In the article I describe how you can work with files across multiple directories — for instance all the matches from a...
View ArticleDired Shell Commands: The find & xargs replacement
If you’re a Linux/BSD user you probably do most of your bulk operations on files with the command line tools find ... -exec or find ... | xargs — but there’s a much better way. Dired (M-x dired or C-x...
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