Comments on: Fun with Vimgolf 3: Swapping Words by Sorting

By: Evaluating Lisp Forms in Regular Expressions | Mastering Emacs

Evaluating Lisp Forms in Regular Expressions | Mastering Emacs — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 13:30:58 +0000

[...] recently did a VimGolf challenge where I abused sort-regexp-fields so I could swap two different words. I decided to do it in the [...]

By: Sorting Rectangles | Irreal

Sorting Rectangles | Irreal — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 10:39:10 +0000

[...] has a nice solution to the last VimGolf in Emacs challenge. It certainly doesn’t win on total keystrokes but it [...]

By: mickey

mickey — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 12:21:41 +0000

Hey, no problem; your solution (or something along those lines) is what I would do were I to solve it ‘in real life.’

I do have another fun solution to this one that does it in a single replace-regexp… but that’s part of a bigger, upcoming article

By: Axel

Axel — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 23:20:59 +0000

Ah, didn’t notice that this is considered the “default” solution and posted over in the referred blog posting.

By: Axel

Axel — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 23:15:13 +0000

Hrm, without magic it’s doable with 8 keystrokes in Emacs, too, given that we have to start at the beginning of the buffer:

1. C-s
2. =
3. C-k
4. Down
5. C-y
6. C-k
7. Up
8. C-y

.oO( C-x C-s

That’s 8 if you don’t count pressing the Control key extra.

If you count the Control key extra, you’ll probably use C-n and C-p instead of Up and Down and keep the Control key pressed as long as possible. You’ll just have to lift it for the “=”.

If you use M-d instead of C-k you’ll need also one C-u C-y instead of one C-y, so that would be 9 key strokes.

I also tried to solve it with Rectangles (C-x r …), but there seems no possibility to narrow-to-rectangle. That’d have been neat: Mark a rectangle around the two words to exchange, narrow-to-rectangle, transpose-words (or transpose-lines), done.