exec-abbrev-cmd.el

Overview

exec-abbrev-command.el lets you execute a command by giving it in an abbreviated form, where the abbreviation takes the first character of each word in the command name. For example “g” is an abbreviation for the command gnus, “eb” is an abbreviation for emms-browser and “omm” is an abbreviation for outline-minor-mode. Of course it is possible, that an abbreviation matches several commands, e.g. “g” matches not only gnus but grep, gdb and some more. In such cases you will be queried, which command to use.

You can also use abbreviations of the form “o-m-m” or “out-m-mo” which both match outline-minor-mode.

To have this functionality quickly accessible you might want to bind it to some key. That’s what I use:

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/elisp") ;; Where is exec-abbrev-cmd.el?
(require 'exec-abbrev-cmd)         ;; Load it.
(global-set-key (kbd "C-x x") 'exec-abbrev-cmd)

Now you’ll say, “Wow, what a nice feature!”, but it’s even getting better. Let’s say you often invoke customize-face with C-x x cf RET and then choosing from the completion list between copy-file and customize-face. Always copy-file is selected first, because it’s lexicographically before customize-face. As a solution to this problem there’s exec-abbrev-cmd-mode, a global minor mode that does bookkeeping how often you invoke a command with exec-abbrev-cmd, so that the list of commands you have to choose from is sorted by the frequency of command invokation.

After a while in most cases C-x x <abbrev> RET RET will do what you want.

If you want to enable this feature put this in your ~/.emacs:

(exec-abbrev-cmd-mode 1)

I blogged about it in this blog article.

Get It!

Clone my Git repository:

git-clone git://www.tsdh.de/exec-abbrev-cmd.git