Switching buffers and Google+

When you do so much of your work in one text editor the efficiency of switching between buffers becomes more important. For a long time I've had two bindings "C-x b" and "C-x C-b" which in days of yore I had bound to bs-show and a hacked up list-buffers that opened another window. These are broadly the "quick switch between working buffers" and "show me all the buffers".

For some time I've relegated bs-show to the longer binding and now use Stephen Bach's excellent Lusty Explorer which works really well when you know the name of the buffer and it's fairly unique. However when you've been going a while it can get un-manageable with a large number of open buffers, especially if you've opened second copy of a file from another source tree. This is what I would use the old classic bs-show for.

A few days ago I discovered ibuffer-mode with it's ibuffer-bs-show buffer navigator. Looking back through the Planet Emacsen history I can see it has been mentioned before and given it's been in Emacs since version 22 I'm surprised I hadn't cottoned on to it earlier.

One thing that might have put me off is the initial buffer list can be quite sparse. By default you only see buffers with files associated which misses out IRC, Edit with Emacs and *scratch* buffers. However hit "h" and you'll see there are a plethora of quick keys for chaning the view. A quick "//" and all filters are removed and you can quickly filter by different criteria. To get the most out of the mode you'll probably want to set up some custom filters ("/r<completing filter name">) to make quickly switching to groups of buffers easy. I currently have "work", "remote", "irc" and "logs" as filters. You can filter by name as well as major-mode.

ibuffer-mode does have the concept of Filter Groups although I'm not sure what they add on top of having normal filters which as far as I can tell can be arbitrarily complex. It also has some quite handy sorting and selection modes e.g. "sv" - sort by last viewing time. Given the amount of space the wiki devotes to the topic I wish I'd re-examined my buffer switching habits sooner. The change is already paying dividends for my productivity.

Before I go I thought I'd put in a quick mention of Google+. There is growing community of fellow Emacs users starting to post on it. One thing that attracts me to Google+ over Facebook (too data-miney) and Twitter (too short) is the concept of "Circles". It makes sharing geeky Emacs posts with people that might actually care easy while sparing them the flood of baby pictures I share with friends and family. If you'd like to follow me or my alter-ego please do mention Emacs in your profile or in a message so I can assign you to the correct circles.