Emacs Rocks! Episode 09: expand-region

http://emacsrocks.com - Rocking emacs tricks and tips screencast.

Follow me on twitter: @emacsrocks

Welcome back to emacs rocks

today I'll show you my definitely most favourite feature

of IntelliJ IDEA

selecting stuff by semantic units

it's an absolutely addictive feature

and JetBrains, in their infinite wisdom,

mapped it to Command-W on the mac

also known as Close Window ...

I still carry with me the frustration,

and bitterness over once again closing Firefox

with *all my tabs*

instead of selecting a word.

So, let's jump in and take a look at expand-region

and let's definitely not bind it to Command-W.

I've got expand-region on Control-@

look at point

see how it first selects the entire word

it expands to the entire sentence ...

the quotes ... the inside of the sexp ...

the entire sexp ... and so on

It's really a quick way of precisely marking whatever is at point

let's try some HTML

expand region works fairly well with most languages,

due to the general nature of its basic expansions

but there are also custom expansions to improve certain modes

like expand-html-attribute

and marking an entire tag

here's some JavaScript

expand to word ...

method call ... return statement ...

block ... function ... object property

I especially like using it with pending-delete-mode

if you start typing with an active region,

the contents are replaced with whatever you type.

you can get expand-region on github

and thanks to Josh Johnston and Le Wang for contributing

I have to say, I'm really loving the extensibility of emacs

whenever people brag about some cool new features

in their favourite editor,

I always pay close attention

who knows -

I might decide to spend a couple of hours

adding it to emacs.