Comments on: Emacs and External Processes

By: An Ediff Tutorial « A Curious Programmer

An Ediff Tutorial « A Curious Programmer — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:19:28 +0000

[...] One thing that isn’t well highlighted (so to speak) is how well ediff drills down on the exact change. It doesn’t just say “this line is different to this line”, it focuses on the exact change within the line. You can easily see here the tags that have been added to an old revision of one of my earlier posts. [...]

By: Jared

Jared — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 21:34:07 +0000

Hi Steve,

Very useful information there. Emacs is pretty TMTOWTDI too eh? And no, I didn’t use a prefix arg so it opened in another buffer but I will next time.

Thanks very much

By: Steve Vinoski

Steve Vinoski — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 21:23:37 +0000

You could use replace-regexp, like this:

M-x replace-regexp[enter]
$.\{72\}$[enter]
\1[ctrl-q][ctrl-j][enter]

where the items in [] are keypresses. The regex is pretty much the same as what you have there in perl, except with more backslashes, and the “ctrl-q ctrl-j” thing is needed to get a newline into the replacement text.

Also, you could shorten your perl like this:

perl -pe ‘s/(.{72})/$1\n/g’

Lastly, I assume you used a prefix arg on your M-| too, since that would cause the perl output to replace the region directly.