Re: Looking for a buffer-cycling library

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2014-11-16, at 18:08, Drew Adams wrote:

>> >>> I'm looking for a buffer cycling mechanism that will ignore
>> >>> any buffer not loaded from or written to a file.
>> >>>
>> >>> Example - any buffer whose name begins with '*' would be
>> >>> "jumped over"
>> >
>> > Just my 2 cents: why not use Icicles?
>> 
>> Because, AFAIU, with Icicles you still need to type `C-x b` to
>> switch buffers.

Fair enough.  You are aware that you can rebind command in Emacs, right?
;-) ;-) ;-)

>> I usually don't have too many open files,
>
> I often have lots of buffers, including lots of open files.

I second that.  My workflow involves seldom quitting Emacs (my current
emacs-uptime is almost 4 days, and it is so short only because my old
netbook hang on Wednesday and I had to reboot - quite often it reaches a
dozen days or so), and I almost never kill buffers - I usually just bury
them (I even have a special keybinding for that, C-u C-z C-b - see
http://mbork.pl/2014-04-04_Fast_buffer_switching_and_friends).  So
cycling alone is not an option for me.

> An advantage of Icicles (and similar approaches) in this regard
> is that you can either cycle or name-match - or both.  Typically,
> typing just a few chars narrows the candidate set to a few that
> you can then cycle among.

This is similar to Ido, which I'm (still) using.

> FWIW: I started down the road to cycling things with Do Re Mi.
> You can use it to cycle among various things or increment various
> things (hence the name).  But in the cycling cases I have, Icicles
> generally gives better behavior, because it lets you combine
> cycling with matching (completion).
>
> One of the things I admonish new Icicles users about is this
> (in the section about cycling):
>
>  Do not become a cycling drone!

Good advice!

>  Cycling and filtering work hand in hand.  If the set of
>  candidates is small to begin with, then just cycling might be
>  quick enough - that is the case if you move among a small set
>  of buffers, for instance.  But with Icicles you can profitably
>  use cycling on even a very large set of candidates - by filtering
>  the set first.

In Ido, I often use C-SPC, which takes what I've typed so far, restricts
the set of candidates to all the matches and lets my type again.  This
way, I can e.g. type one part of the filename, then C-SPC, then another
part, then cycle.  AFAIR, in Icicles you can do the same, with the
difference that keybindings are (probably) different, and the mechanism
is more general.

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adam Mickiewicz University