2008-12-12

cycling through your buffers with Ctrl-Tab

Emacs-users tend to have many buffers open, -- maybe some source code files, an email message, a short note etc.There are many ways to switch from one buffer to another, but I like the quick and easy way of cycling through them with Ctrl-Tab, just like tabs in Firefox.

It's quite trivial to add this keybinding to your .emacs: 

;; cycle through buffers with Ctrl-Tab (like Firefox)
(global-set-key (kbd "<C-tab>") 'bury-buffer)
If you want a more advanced version that ignores certain buffers, you could take a look at ControlTABbufferCycling in EmacsWiki.
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6 comments:

  1. MikhailDecember 17, 2008 at 6:26 PM

    There are also useful combinations: C-x C-right (or just right) and C-x C-left (or just left) that invoke (next-buffer) and (previous-buffer) commands respectively. The advantage here is that when you jump over a buffer that you needed, you can step back.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousFebruary 11, 2009 at 9:08 PM

    I used your idea and Mikhail's idea to bind control-shift-tab to previous buffer. It works great!

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  3. AnonymousJune 28, 2011 at 11:59 PM

    How did you bind Ctrl-Shift-Tab. I tried

    (global-set-key (kbd "C-S-") 'bury-buffer)

    but that did not work.

    ReplyDelete
  4. djcbJune 29, 2011 at 12:25 AM

    @Anonymous: the generic rule for binding some key is pressing C-h k, then the key you want to use. Then emacs will display a (kbd ...)-compatible description.

    I think the comments section eats greater-than and smaller-than, but for me it looks like:

    [C-S-iso-lefttab]

    (and replace the square brackers with smaller than, greater than.

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  5. AnonymousJune 30, 2011 at 3:07 AM

    Thanks! Turns out I had emacs version 21.4 installed, so I got the previous/next functions from http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/prev-next-buffer.el and bound them as you mentioned.

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  6. AnonymousSeptember 21, 2013 at 10:57 PM

    This is the way to do it:

    ;cycle through buffers with Ctrl-Tab (like in Firefox)
    (global-set-key (kbd "") 'other-window)

    It does the same thing as "C-x o"

    ReplyDelete