rlazo's blog

As a side note, I finally got a (paid) hosting for myself with my own domain (rlazo.org), so soon I'll be migrating my blog plus other content there. Currently there's nothing to see, but in a few weeks I hope to have everything set.

Sometimes I need to insert into a buffer a path (e.g. /home/user/.emacs) and I want to use emacs' excellent completion capabilities. It turns out to be pretty easy to implement this function in elisp. Here is the snippet:

(defun insert-path ()
  "Inserts a path into the buffer with completion"
  (interactive)
  (insert (expand-file-name (read-file-name "Path: "))))

As always, any comments on the code above are more than welcome :)

Another way of doing it suggested by Peter Mielke is:

(defun insert-path (file)
 "insert file"
 (interactive "FPath: ")
 (insert (expand-file-name file)))

I think this is a better option because uses interactive built-in support for file input rather than using the read-file-name function. Thank you for the tip Peter

On emacs.help a very interesting thread about you, your fingers and emacs is taking place. Is no secret that emacs extensive use of "key combos" is both a blessing and a curse. While they make almost every feature of emacs a few keystrokes away, they can also put your fingers and wrist under continus stress

Between the suggestions to improve the situation are: swap caps lock and control, swap alt and ctrl, change your keyboard layout to dvorak, etc.

Here is the link to the gmane archive of the thread with more links and more comments.

Don't forget that emacs.help is a public mailing list where you can take part :). Go ahead and subscribe.