I’d often blog about some useful utility functions here. Pretty much all of them get included in Emacs Prelude, but I’ve decided I can do one better and extract those of them which are most useful/universal into a separate package.

This package is crux - a Collection of Ridiculously Useful eXtensions for Emacs.

You can install it from MELPA and MELPA Stable. Once this is done you just have to pick keybindings for the commands shipped with crux. I’ve suggested some keybindings here. And here’s a small configuration snippet showing how to actually bind keys to some of crux’s commands:

(global-set-key [remap move-beginning-of-line] #'crux-move-beginning-of-line)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c o") #'crux-open-with)
(global-set-key [(shift return)] #'crux-smart-open-line)
(global-set-key (kbd "s-r") #'crux-recentf-ido-find-file)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-<backspace>" #'crux-kill-line-backwards))
(global-set-key [remap kill-whole-line] #'crux-kill-whole-line)

crux also ships with some handy advises that can enhance the operation of existing commands.

For instance - you can use crux-with-region-or-buffer to make a command acting normally on a region to operate on the entire buffer in the absense of a region. Here are a few examples you can stuff in your config:

(crux-with-region-or-buffer indent-region)
(crux-with-region-or-buffer untabify)

So, this is crux for you - simple and neat! I’d love it if you contributed more useful commands to it, so we can make it even more versatile!