Emacs all the time

I use Emacs for pretty much all of my normal editing. Now, before anyone rips me apart, I admit that I haven't given vi that much of a trial. I've never sat down for the vi tutorial. Maybe it's better, maybe it's not. I don't know. What I DO know is that I love using emacs over any of the other little editors in widows, emacs is faster and easier than UltraEdit. A million times better than notepad or WordPad. My favorite thing is Macros. I use macros like nobody's business. In fact, there's a couple I use all the time and saved in my .emacs file.

;;Index a node of XML
(fset 'indent-xml-1
   [?\C-s ?> ?< left return])

;;Index the first 3000 lines of an XML file
(fset 'indent-xml
   [C-home ?\C-1 ?\C-0 ?\C-0 ?\C-0 ?\M-x ?i ?n ?d ?e ?n ?t ?- ?x ?m ?l ?- ?1 return ?\C-x ?h ?\C-\M-\\])
I know there's probably a simpler, cleaner way of writing it, but I don't have the time. This is how emacs saved my macro and it's fine.

Here's another awesome function I found to create a new scratch buffer. I can never have enough scratch buffers. Mainly because I hate opening up new windows for emacs. I like having 1 or 2 tops.


(defun create-scratch-buffer nil
  "create a new scratch buffer to work in. (could be *scratch* - *scratchX*)"
  (interactive)
  (let ((n 0)
        bufname)
    (while (progn
      (setq bufname (concat "*scratch"
       (if (= n 0) "" (int-to-string n))
       "*"))
     (setq n (1+ n))
     (get-buffer bufname)))
    (switch-to-buffer (get-buffer-create bufname))
   (if (= n 1) (lisp-interaction-mode)) ; 1, because n was incremented
    ))