Here's my personal Emacs configuration in case it's useful to anyone. This readme only describes the more significant features.

I wrote the function my-cur-word-or-region to return a string containing the word that surrounds the point. If the current region is active, it returns that instead. I call this from various other functions when I want a default value based on the user's context.

The original function from which I call it is my-recursive-grep. That basically executes find | xargs grep foo and places the result in a grep-mode buffer. Its extra features are:

• Guesses the search term from context.
• The results accumulate in the results buffer live.
• Prompts for the starting directory, defaulting to the cwd.
• The full search command line can be edited before executing.
• Previous search commands and starting directories are saved in the history.
• Always skips the .git sub-tree.
• Prefix args modify the command line for variations I find helpful:
  • no prefix: search all files
  • single C-u prefix: search files matching a pattern
  • double C-u prefix: the search pattern is the file name itself (i.e. don't run grep)

I've changed the prefix behavior of kill and yank (a.k.a. cut/copy/paste) with the custom functions my-kill-region, my-kill-ring-save, and my-yank. A numeric prefix 0 through 9 operates on an Emacs register of the same name. For example, a prefix argument of 1 to my-kill-region does an ordinary kill-region, but it also stores the killed text in register 1. Similarly, a prefix argument of 1 to my-yank will insert the text from register 1 instead of from the kill ring. Without a prefix, my-yank just yanks from the kill ring. Both my-kill-region and my-kill-ring-save copy to register 0 when no prefix is specified.

(Emacs supports more than 10 registers, but I find 10 is plenty for me. Also, I don't want to hassle with somehow converting numeric prefix args into alphabetic registers.)

This feature is useful when I need to interleave pasting a constant string of text with frequent kill-region operations.

I've added some features to shell-command with the wrapper function my-interactive-shell-command. If you exit the minibuffer with C-Enter instead of Enter, the command runs in the background without waiting for the result, and the result is discarded. If you exit the minibuffer with M-Enter, the command is saved and not executed. It will be the default command on the next call to the same function. Also, a prefix arg causes the current region or word surrounding the point to be appended to the minibuffer.

I also use this enhancement in dired mode when executing a command on one or more selected files.

I wrote replace-special-chars to convert common Unicode punctuation into ASCII. The vast majority of my text files are 7-bit ASCII, and I don't want to pollute them with Unicode when pasting text from the web or other documents.

The functions query-replace-multibuf and query-replace-regexp-multibuf perform a query-replace across all buffers. This is useful for a global rename operation.

The function my-toggle-completions-window is a quick hack so I can live with the default minibuffer completion mechanism until I get comfortable with something like [ido] 1 or [icicles] 2. It toggles between the minibuffer and the completions window, and I map it to S-Tab.

The bs-show feature built into Emacs (bs.el) calls bs-select when you tell it to display one or more buffers. I redefined bs-select to call the custom function my-tile-windows when more than one buffer is selected. It creates a tiled layout of windows where the minimum width is half of split-width-threshold, and the heights are as equal as possible. Here are some example layouts in ASCII art:

• Frame wide enough to support only 1 window:

    2 bufs     3 bufs     4 bufs
    +-----+    +-----+    +-----+
    |     |    |     |    |     |
    |     |    |     |    +-----+
    |     |    +-----+    |     |
    +-----+    |     |    +-----+
    |     |    +-----+    |     |
    |     |    |     |    +-----+
    |     |    |     |    |     |
    +-----+    +-----+    +-----+

• Frame wide enough to support 2 windows:

      2 buffers        3 buffers        4 buffers
    +-----+-----+    +-----+-----+    +-----+-----+
    |     |     |    |     |     |    |     |     |
    |     |     |    |     |     |    |     |     |
    |     |     |    |     +-----+    +-----+-----+
    |     |     |    |     |     |    |     |     |
    |     |     |    |     |     |    |     |     |
    +-----+-----+    +-----+-----+    +-----+-----+

• Frame wide enough to support 3 windows:

         2 buffers              3 buffers              4 buffers
    +--------+--------+    +-----+-----+-----+    +-----+-----+-----+
    |        |        |    |     |     |     |    |     |     |     |
    |        |        |    |     |     |     |    |     |     |     |
    |        |        |    |     |     |     |    |     |     +-----+
    |        |        |    |     |     |     |    |     |     |     |
    |        |        |    |     |     |     |    |     |     |     |
    +--------+--------+    +-----+-----+-----+    +-----+-----+-----+

         5 buffers              6 buffers              7 buffers
    +-----+-----+-----+    +-----+-----+-----+    +-----+-----+-----+
    |     |     |     |    |     |     |     |    |     |     |     |
    |     |     |     |    |     |     |     |    |     |     +-----+
    |     +-----+-----+    +-----+-----+-----+    +-----+-----|     |
    |     |     |     |    |     |     |     |    |     |     +-----+
    |     |     |     |    |     |     |     |    |     |     |     |
    +-----+-----+-----+    +-----+-----+-----+    +-----+-----+-----+