Re: Emacs Book Vs Emacs Manuals

[Emanuel Berg]

Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> writes:

>> What do you typically produce with your macros?
>> If you give me a good example where the macro is
>> the life saver, I can think how I would do the
>> same thing.
>
> What about this: you have a LaTeX table with 4
> columns, and you want to delete the second one.
> While you /can/ do it with LaTeX hackery
> (essentially making one of the columns invisible),
> you want to deal with it at the level of the source
> file. You put the point at the beginning of the
> first row and do something along these lines:
>
> F3 C-s & RET C-SPC C-s C-s RET C-w C-a C-n F4
>
> and then press F4 once for each row (or even C-8 F4
> if you know you have 8 more rows to go).
>
> I cannot see how Elisp could be faster for this,
> even if you /think/ in Elisp /and/ can touch-type.

Oh, yeah?

\begin{longtable}
  1 & 2 & 3 & 4 \\\\
  a & b & c & d \\\\
  A & B & C & D
\end{longtable}

%% (replace-regexp "^\\(.*&.*&\\).*&\\(.*\\)" "\\1\\2")

\begin{longtable}
  1 & 2 & 4 \\\\
  a & b & d \\\\
  A & B & D
\end{longtable}

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573