One of the benefits of using the
one true editor (that's
EMACS you
heathens!) is that you
get more features than you ever knew you'd need. One of these features
is
hippie-expand, written by Anders Holst.
Basically, when you invoke hippie-expand, it tries to expand (much
like tab completion the word you are currently typing by matching it
against
- file names - hippie-expand scans your file system to see if it
looks like you are trying to type the name of a file or directory.
- the current buffer - hippie-expand looks in the current buffer
(and other buffers on failure) to see if the word you are typing
matches an already existing one.
- exact line match - hippie-expand checks if there exist lines with
the current line as prefix.
- the kill buffer - hippie-expand also scans the kill ring to see
the text there matches what you are typing.
All in all, it's an extremely useful
feature, especially if you are
coding and have to use
long variable
names. It's not turned on by default, but that's easily remedied if
you stick something like
(global-set-key (quote [167]) (quote hippie-expand))
in your .emacs file. This particular example ties hippie-expand to the
key above TAB and to the left of 1 on a swedish keyboard (no-one ever
uses that key anyway).