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

Pedro Andres Aranda Gutierrez <[email protected]> writes:

> 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) 

Yes, two for the first range and two for the second.

>                 and I found it easier
> to delete and extract and then re-insert.

In the end (transpose-subr-1), that is what a command like
transpose-lines does as well.

>> 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.

If you have any questions how some code works (especially if it is part
of do-at-point, but I ought to manage Embark as well), I am glad to
help.

>> > 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.

Ah OK, I don't have access to the copyright file so I wanted to
double-check since it wasn't clear to me from the message above.

>> > 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