Emacs kaizen: ace-isearch combines ace-jump-mode and helm-swoop

Posted: - Modified: | emacs

I’m a fan of clever little things that change their behaviour depending on what you’re doing while letting you mentally think of it as just one function.

ace-isearch looks like it’ll be useful for collapsing three different functions into one mental thing in my head:

  • jumping to a specific character that I can see (ace-jump-mode)
  • searching through a buffer for a few characters (isearch)
  • doing helm-swoop to quickly preview and navigate through matching lines in a buffer

If you install the ace-isearch package and turn on global-ace-isearch-mode, then searching for a single character triggers ace-jump-mode, searching for less than 5 characters triggers isearch, and anything longer triggers helm-swoop-from-isearch. You can customize those thresholds, of course.

Neat!

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