Re: move-lines.el: a lazy programmer's package to move lines around

"Pedro A. Aranda" <[email protected]> writes:

> Hi
>
> I'm back from my Internet-free month and ready to start a fruitful
> discussion.
>
> First of all, thanks for the interest and the encouragement. It was a
> temptation to take my computer to the holidays and work on this, but I
> resisted :-)
>
> Things that have come up and I've been maturing:
>
> 1.- landscape: I need to start browsing ELPA to find other packages
> that could implement something like this. I recognise that I've been
> using move-text for too long to look for alternatives.

Also recall that transpose-lines exists in Emacs.

> 2.- (maybe this should be first) my motivation: I was using move-text
> to move one or more lines. When writing pure text, a paragraph is just
> a block of lines and when I needed to move a sentence, I'd select the
> sentence, kill it to the kill-buffer and yank it at its new position.
> move-text wasn't intuitive for this and I never tried to hard to learn
> how to do it.

Have you taken a look at Embark or my do-at-point package?  It might
provide some inspiration.  It might be interesting to provide some
generalized tranpose-thing command.

> 3.- repeat-maps: Never used them, but happy to learn how to use them :-)
>
> My main concern is that I don't know how to write one for the situation:
>
> Currently, I'm using C-S-up and C-S-down and I think I would be able
> to write a repeat-map for this. However, suppose user uses C-S-up and
> C-S-down to mark paragraphs and wants to remap move-lines-up and
> move-lines-down. Is there a way to reflect the new bindings in a repeat map?

They would also have to update the repeat map in that case.

> 4.- Contributing the code: there are already a couple lines of mine in
> Emacs plain and I'm contributing a bit more to org-mode, so I don't
> think it would be a problem.

What is this in reference to?  Have you signed the FSF copyright assignment?

> Best, /PA
>
>
> On 11/08/2026 06:44, Richard Stallman wrote:
>> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
>> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
>> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>>    > >>> What exactly is your concern here?  Having a command that
>> can move
>>    > >>> around text in an interactive setting is useful in general, but also not
>>    > >>> something that we expect to be upgraded and extended extensively, so
>>    > >>> having it stable and complete in core sounds like a good idea to me,
>> That's what I thought, too, when I first saw this.  Also, I think it
>> is worth some effort and discussion to choose a command interface that
>> is very natural and easy for people to remember.
>> That could make the difference between a useful feature and a very
>> handy feature.
>>