I always like to read others people hacking tips, mostly because I suck a lot at using any tool correctly and I am almost always enlightened by them. Today I’ll try to contribute one small trick to the pool.
I remember the last time I posted something about gtk-look.el, someone asked me: “Why would you want to use that? You know about devhelp right?”. My answer at that point was “It’s faster and I like to get the help inside emacs if it’s possible”. Those are quite valid points on their own, but today I can add more benefits: meet Icicles.
The short description of Icicles is that it adds super-powers to any emacs mini-buffer interaction, among other things. But as always, an example is more instructive than a thousand words.
Say we are merrily hacking on our GTK+ application with GtkTreeView (a classical mistake), and we have, as always, forgotten how to set a treeview in multiple selection mode. No problem, let’s look it up. First, we press C-h C-j , bind in our box to ‘gtk-look’. After that we type ‘selection’, as we’re pretty sure the function will contain that name.
Now we press S-TAB, which is Apropos-Complete in Icicles (ie, show me any string that contains my input).
Well, there’s quite a few huh? No problem, let’s narrow the search with M-*, aka Match-Also-Regexp. This will filter our result with everthing than does not match our input, akin to adding an extra grep to end of a pipe in a shell. So, as we are interested in GtkTreeView, we do M-* tree S-TAB:
That’s better! In fact I think I see what I want now, gtk_tree_selection_set_mode. So once more… M-* set_mode S-TAB… There’s only one hit now, so Icicles will select it automatically for us in the mini-buffer:
Enter, and we open it in our browser of choice (w3m for emacs here):
Yep, that was it.
Of course the beauty of this is that we did all that pretty fast and without moving our hands from the keyboard.
There are other cool things here, like the ability to save any completion to a cache to speed up things massively. Say, if you hack on GTK+ you are bound to cycle through its docs many times, so save only the gtk API reference search to a cache file and start your completions from there. See this for more details.
This of course barely scratches the surface, so if you use emacs I recommend you to spend some time in the Icicles wiki, install it and play with it. You won’t be disappointed.
