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

Hi Philip,

On Wed, 2 Sept 2026 at 18:14, Philip Kaludercic <[email protected]> wrote:

> "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.
>

Right.. part of the motivation for move-lines was that I didn't manage to
tame transpose-lines for my purpose.
I tried, but I got lost calculating all necessary points (four if memory
serves me well) and I found it easier
to delete and extract and then re-insert.

> 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.
>

Hmmm... that could be a good exercise :-)
Don't know if my emacs Lisp is enough for that.


> > 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?
>

I signed the FSF paperwork a couple of years ago to add the flat-button
type to the faces and
there are also a couple contribs to manual of mine.
I'm currently maintaining ox-latex.el and ox-beamer.el in org-mode.


> > 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.
> >>
>

Best, /PA


-- 
Fragen sind nicht da, um beantwortet zu werden,
Fragen sind da um gestellt zu werden
Georg Kreisler

"Sagen's Paradeiser" (ORF: Als Radiohören gefährlich war) => write BE!
Year 2 of the New Koprocracy

*IA: onomatopeya del rebuznar*

This was produced by a human (implied virtues and weaknesses acknowledged)
Don't feed your ArtStup (SKA AI) with this. It won't make YOU smarter...