Whizz between windows with windmove

First up, a reminder: in Emacs’ terminology the thing we usually call a window in other apps (the main display of an app with the menus etc at the top) is called a frame, and the individual panes within that (usually displaying different buffers side by side) are called windows.

Once you have been using Emacs for a while, you might find it more efficient to have a single large frame with several windows open inside displaying different buffers. It is then really easy to move between them using the built-in library windmove.

Activate windmove by adding the following to your emacs config file:

(use-package windmove
  ;; :defer 4
  :ensure t
  :config
  ;; use command key on Mac
  (windmove-default-keybindings 'super)
  ;; wrap around at edges
  (setq windmove-wrap-around t))

Now you can hold down the super key (Command on a Mac) and press arrow keys to move to windows in any direction. Note that the default key is shift plus arrow, but this conflicts rather painfully with org-mode, so I prefer super.

Advertisement

Sorting an org-mode table

You can quickly sort tables in org-mode by using C-c ^ with the point inside a table. You’ll be prompted for a sorting type, where you can choose e.g. a for alphabetic or n for numeric. You can use capital letter versions of these options to reverse the sort.

The table is sorted based on the column that the point is in, and from the documentation:

The range of lines is the range between the nearest horizontal separator lines, or the entire table of no such lines exist.

Cycle through query history in mu4e

I accidentally discovered that you can use M-<left> and M-<right> to run the commands mu4e-headers-query-prev and mu4e-headers-query-next to quickly cycle through your previous queries. In mu4e this means this means previous searches but also different views like drafts and sent mail. Of course, this is in the manual but I had missed it before now.

Use org-mode tables and structures in emails and elsewhere

I love the way that org-mode allows you to add simple clean structures to your text, with lists and tables. You can get some of that functionality in other modes by using orgstruct-mode and orgtbl-mode, which are part of org-mode.

Enable these minor modes in any major mode for one-off use with M-x orgstruct++-mode or M-x orgtbl-mode and you can use the normal org-mode commands to create lists and tables. I find this especially useful in emails, so I use this code in my emacs config file to automatically enable these for message-mode

;; use org structures and tables in message mode
(add-hook 'message-mode-hook 'turn-on-orgtbl)
(add-hook 'message-mode-hook 'turn-on-orgstruct++)