How to use emacs more efficiently for many changes across multiple files
Version 1 Created by Jonathan
M. at 6:07am.
While emacs and its regexp are great, I never knew one could be even more powerful with TAGS in emacs that allows you to process multiple files. Without this, I'd have to use VC++ with its broken regexp and horrible key sequences and/or mouse clicks required.
While there are many linux and other emacs ways of doing multiple files, nothing worked out for me very well except the use of TAGS.
When converting my code to the new general storage format and other changes, it became crucial to have multiple file regexp change ability. And one can easily do it!
With emacs, one does something like the following:
1) cd <base harm tree>
2) ctags -e *.c *.h initboundcode/*.c initboundcode/*.h <enter>
3) emacs & <enter>
4) ALT-X
5) visit-tags-table <enter>
6) <enter> # this loads by default the file: TAGS that I already created but that #2 created.
Now your TAG stuff is loaded and you are ready for multiple file processing. There are special "tag" commands:
ALT-X tags-query-replace
ALT-X tags-search
and others. The above 2 are just like:
ALT-X query-replace-regexp
CTRL-S OR ALT-X search-forward
ALT-X search-forward-regexp
that do regexp research replace, search, and regexp search, respectively.
There is apparently no "dumb" version of tags-query-replace, so that means even your input has to be regexp (e.g. to search for array[123] one must search for array\[123\]). Output is always non-regexp except for regexp variables.
-Jon
1.8.3.1
