A couple of quick, unrelated packages today.

first up, ibuffer. If you keep Emacs open all the time, you'll start to accumulate buffers. Last time, I talked about using projectile and how that can help when navigating between buffers. IBuffer is another one.

Out of the box, C-x C-b is bound to the Emacs list-buffers command. It brings up a buffer with all the buffers listed inside it. You can navigate that buffer and hit enter on a particular buffer to go to it. You can also mark buffers and then operate on all the marked buffers. Hitting h in the list-buffers buffer brings up more details.

IBuffer is like list-buffers on steroids. It looks much nicer and I think it has more functionality (again hitting h in the buffer brings up help).

IBuffer really shines though, once you start customizing it. I found this post by Martin Owen which shows how to customize the way ibuffer appears. You can group buffers however you want or even omit some from the listing.

Here's my configuration (mostly stolen from Owen):

(global-set-key (kbd "C-x C-b") 'ibuffer)
(setq ibuffer-saved-filter-groups
(quote (("default"
("dired" (mode . dired-mode))
("org" (name . "^.*org$"))

("web" (or (mode . web-mode) (mode . js2-mode)))
("shell" (or (mode . eshell-mode) (mode . shell-mode)))
("mu4e" (name . "\*mu4e\*"))
("programming" (or
(mode . python-mode)
(mode . c++-mode)))
("emacs" (or
(name . "^\\*scratch\\*$")
(name . "^\\*Messages\\*$")))
))))
(add-hook 'ibuffer-mode-hook
(lambda ()
(ibuffer-auto-mode 1)
(ibuffer-switch-to-saved-filter-groups "default")))

;; don't show these
;(add-to-list 'ibuffer-never-show-predicates "zowie")
;; Don't show filter groups if there are no buffers in that group
(setq ibuffer-show-empty-filter-groups nil)

;; Don't ask for confirmation to delete marked buffers
(setq ibuffer-expert t)

The video also shows emmet mode. A terrific mode for quickly creating HTML and CSS. I tried it a long time ago when it was called zencoding and found it lacking but after watching this video at Build Fun Things I started playing with it again. It's a real winner.

Here's the config I'm using:

(use-package emmet-mode
:ensure t
:config
(add-hook 'sgml-mode-hook 'emmet-mode) ;; Auto-start on any markup modes
(add-hook 'web-mode-hook 'emmet-mode) ;; Auto-start on any markup modes
(add-hook 'css-mode-hook  'emmet-mode) ;; enable Emmet's css abbreviation.
)

Check them both out:

Relevant links:

• Video series overview page:
• http://cestlaz.github.io/stories/emacs
• Code:
• https://github.com/zamansky/using-emacs/tree/master