Sometimes people tend to overlook how well Emacs and Emacs Lisp are integrated. Basically there is no limit to the places where you can evaluate a bit of Emacs Lisp and reap the associated benefits. From time to time I find myself editing something and thinking - “Hey, it’d be really great of I could just insert the result of some Emacs Lisp expression at point!” (my thoughts are pretty crazy, right?). Here’s a contrived example - I might have to enter somewhere the result of 1984 / 16. I can calculate that manually or I can fire up M-x calc and get the result, or I can play extra smart and devise the following command (which I did not actually devise - I’m pretty sure I saw it in someone else’s config a while back):

(defun eval-and-replace ()
  "Replace the preceding sexp with its value."
  (interactive)
  (backward-kill-sexp)
  (condition-case nil
      (prin1 (eval (read (current-kill 0)))
             (current-buffer))
    (error (message "Invalid expression")
           (insert (current-kill 0)))))

Let’s bind that to C-c e:

(global-set-key (kbd "C-c e") 'eval-and-replace)

Now in the buffer I’m currently editing I can type (/ 1984 16) and press C-c e afterwards getting the result 124 replace the original expression. Pretty neat!

I’ll leave it up to you to think of more creative applications of the command.

This command is available in crux as crux-eval-and-replace. This command is also available in prelude via the crux package.