Re: Operations on a region

[Frédéric Bothamy]

* Arnold <oscar@trashcan.com> [2002-11-22 10:04] :
> Hi,
> I'm a vi user trying to learn emacs.  In vi, I could very easily mark a 
> region and do an operation on it.  e.g. :'a,'bs/blah/word/'  or 
> :'a,'b!sort.  So far, the closest I've seen is to mark a region and then 
> narrow into it, but that's not as easy as on vi and it I can't run a 
> command on it and have the output replace that contents of that region.
> 
> Lisp is also new to me, but I'm thinking of trying to craft a script 
> that will automatically narrow in, prompt me for the search-replace 
> stuff, and then automatically widen back out.
> 
> Does anyone have a better way, or is this problem perhaps already solved 
> already?  

Well, according to query-replace documentation, in
transient-mark-mode, if the mark active, query-replace (M-%) will do
exactly what you want. And indeed, it works! (for Emacs 21.2 and 20.7)

Fred