My Emacs Package of the Week: CRUX

2022-03-01

598 words, ~4min reading time

Some packages get mentioned over and over on different blogs and other Emacs related platforms. And other packages do not seem to get the same degree of attention (or at least I don't see it) although they deserve it. IMO one of these is CRUX, which is most fittingly described as "a Collection of Ridiculously Useful eXtensions for Emacs" by its created, Bozhidar Batsov. It does provide a large collection of helper functions that may assist you in all kinds of situations of your Emacs life. I think I stumbled upon the package when reading an Emacs configuration file of some other fanatic and added it to my configuration after some inspection. And I have not regretted it ever since!

As with the functionality of Emacs itself I also only use a very small subset of the commands that CRUX provides. There are currently only five functions that I actively use (or intend to do so) out of the 32 ones that are currently provided. So I won't go into full detail above all of them but only shortly cover the ones that sweeten my daily use.

• crux-duplicate-current-line-or-region which (as the name already says) duplicates the currently selected text or (if nothing is selected) the current line. I have it bound to C-c C-..

• crux-duplicate-and-comment-current-line-or-region is quite similar, it also does the duplication but also comments the current line or selection/region out. This helps me quite a lot when developing and wanting to test something slightly different for the current line. I bound this one to C-c C-M-..

• crux-delete-file-and-buffer is another small helper that not only deletes the current file but also its buffer inside Emacs leaving no trace left. Because I know myself and already cursed a lot while trying to restore completely deleted files and folders (if I remember correctly the theme of this blog once became the victim of such an accident during initial development and before the first Git commit) I deliberately decided to not bind some key to this command. I rather executed it using M-x.

• crux-rename-file-and-buffer on the other hand is a completely safe command that helps to rename a file and its associated buffer. Since I need to do this quite often I decided to bind it to C-c M-r.

• crux-top-join-line is another small helper to join lines. This means that the line break and all whitespace (except one) is removed. To be honest, I don't use this yet but I have an urgent need for this functionality and will bind to some key quite soon.

The funny thing is that the functions defined in crux.el are neither that large (or use many helper functions themselves) nor very complex. It would be quite easy to implement most stuff on your own and it would certainly provide a great opportunity for learning a bit of Emacs Lisp (and Emacs). And I'm sure many have implemented at least some functions on their own. While I must admit that from time to time I'm tempted to do the same I am really grateful that this awesome package exists so that I can focus on other things.

If you have not heard, looked or tried CRUX for yourself then I can only recommend it and I encourage you to take a look and see what it can provide for you.

Day 18 of the #100DaysToOffload challenge.