domingo, 6 de marzo de 2011

Window navigation on Emacs

Last week I was talking about some emacs features with a coworker (while talking about General User Interfaces, pros and cons of WIMP), and ended with the doubt whether there is a way for easier window navigation on Emacs, or c-x o is the only way to go.

I talked about one of the greatest aid to frame/window navigation of screen and ratpoison, that is window numbering, and being able to switch to random windows instead of just sequentially.

Well, today I spent some time thinking about possible solutions, and searching for already implemented modes.

Guess what? There are a couple of ways already implemented (in default emacs, or as an extra downloadable package).

Windmove comes bundled with emacs since 21-dot-something, and in fact is what vimpulse uses for the c-w [hjkl] emulation.
(windmove-default-keybindings) ; enable shift-arrow
Expanding the concept further, there's also FrameMove, that integrates seamlessly with windmove. Here's a little extra info about it.

I found a couple of more esoteric plugins to navigate windows, but haven't tried them.
http://blog.lathi.net/articles/2007/11/07/jumping-to-specific-windows-in-emacs explains how to jump to windows by title. I suppose like ido-mode or anything-buffers.

There's also https://github.com/dimitri/switch-window , that seems to bring ratpoison's numbering of frames to emacs' windows. Nice idea. Here follows a screenshot of switch-window from it's homepage.

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