Emacs Tidbit: rectangle-number-lines
Emacs has so many little features that do exactly what you need in very specific circumstances. Here’s one that I just
found out about: rectangle-number-lines
. I had some lines and I wanted to insert line-numbers for reference. I
wanted this
arguments list: [
team8721038424565681034
user
fdff6f87-d876-4558-8d12-19e039e5a880
a
foo
secret
alsothis
b
e46e2d16-b3ba-4f84-826f-5e3031465e21
]
To be this
arguments list: [
1 team8721038424565681034
2 user
3 fdff6f87-d876-4558-8d12-19e039e5a880
4 a
5 foo
6 secret
7 alsothis
8 b
9 e46e2d16-b3ba-4f84-826f-5e3031465e21
]
I started thinking about kmacros, which I rarely use but have an incrementing counter you can use for this, but I started
googling and lo and behold I found a Stack Overflow post with the answer. Just highlight a rectangle on the first
column1 and type C-x r N
which runs rectangle-number-lines
, which does exactly what I
wanted.
Discussion
-
Since I use
evil
, I just typeC-v
to enter visual block mode, but I looked it up for vanilla Emacs andC-x SPC
to set the rectangle mark. ↩︎