Quick Tip: Easier Window Switching in Emacs

May 1st, 2008 by Rob Christie · 20 Comments

I ran across this thread on easier window switching within emacs using the windmove-xxx commands on gnu.emacs.help a few days ago. It’s always nice to find out about commands I didn’t know about… kinda like C-x M-c M-butterfly. I have always used C-x o and C-x b to move between windows and buffers, but my work monitor is large enough to allow me to split my frame into four windows. Using C-x o to move around has been somewhat of an annoyance. The windmove commands allow you to move up, down, left, and right between windows using a prefix key and the arrows on your keyboard. I have added the following to my .emacs:

(windmove-default-keybindings 'meta)

If you invoke the command without an argument then shift is used as the prefix. I also had to place this below the turning on of pc-selection-mode because it also sets the M-up, M-down, M-left, and M-right keys.

Tags: quick · tips

20 responses so far ↓

1 Luke Hoersten // May 1, 2008 at 7:23 pm

I was unable to get this to work on Mac OS X. I’m going to try Ubuntu when I get home. Any hints for Mac OS X? I’m new to it.
2 Knusper // May 1, 2008 at 8:22 pm

Ah… Nice trick…
3 Rob Christie // May 1, 2008 at 9:36 pm

@Luke – I am using carbon emacs on Mac OS X. What version are you using?
4 Seung-Cheol Jung // May 2, 2008 at 1:19 am

It works perfectly for me on the zenitani’s carbon emacs.
5 Jia // May 6, 2008 at 12:48 pm

This is a nice one. Thanks a lot.
6 Andy Norris // May 6, 2008 at 6:20 pm

I’m an Emacs heretic, and defined a whole mess of CUA-style bindings (C-o for find-file, C-s for save-buffer, etc.), so my arrow keys are spoken for with things like M-left as backward-word.

But I’ve found C-n for other-window and C-b for switch-to-buffer to be quite nice in my 3 window setup.
7 Michael // May 6, 2008 at 8:46 pm

Works like a champ in Aquamacs
8 Cheezwizard // May 8, 2008 at 10:49 pm

Does this work in XEMACS
9 Ustun // May 10, 2008 at 11:40 am

brilliant!
10 Prashanth // May 20, 2008 at 8:45 am

Great tip ! I tried the (windmove-default-keybindings ‘meta) and works fine on my Powerbook with 10.4.5 and CarbonEmacs
11 piyo // May 23, 2008 at 3:57 pm

windmove is great stuff. This is just my personal preference, but I bind the movement to a first-person shooting game like “WASD” key layout: C-l {C-e, C-s, C-d, C-f}. (Yes, C-l is a prefix key for me.) This helps me on those remoted ssh sessions to linux emacs. (well, okay, Meta/Alt Arrow-Key seems to be going through, but Control or Shift Arrow-Key doesn’t).

If you use GNU screen, you can also do this directional window movement tip (e.g. ‘bind “^d” focus down’).

Coming back to emacs: I use winner-mode in combination with windmove to give me more control with the windows. winner-mode is like a “browser back button” for your ever-changing windows configurations.
12 Alex V. Koval // Jun 12, 2008 at 6:57 am

In my Linux, I bind keys the following way:
Alt+Up = previous frame
Alt+Down = next frame
Ctrl+Shift+Right = next file
Ctrl+Shift+Left = prev file
Ctrl+Shift+Up = next file (including special buffers *)
Ctrl+Shift+Down = prev special file
Ctrl+Tab = buffer switch

The idea is that this way you can easily go next/prev file without need to ‘cycle’.

My exact emacs config can be found here:
http://public.halogen-dg.com/browser/alex-emacs-settings/dotemacs-alex-common.el
13 l30 // Sep 12, 2008 at 3:04 pm

That one was very nice.. I was about to give up.
tks!
14 Harris // Sep 17, 2008 at 5:45 am

Works well, Thanks!
15 antonios // Oct 8, 2008 at 1:39 pm

This was very helpful! Thanks!

16 boycer // Nov 15, 2008 at 2:06 pm

windmove does not work on XEmacs without some help. First, be sure and get an older version of windmove.el that does not call the function ‘window-inside-edges’. I downloaded windmove.el Version: 0.93 (beta) from here:

http://hovav.net/elisp/windmove-0.93.el

Next, you need to put some code in your init.el file that sits in the folder .xemacs/ (found in your home directory on *nix machines). The first line just loads the windmove code. After that is code was written by Hovav Shacham, the author of windmove.el, so that windmove will work on XEmacs:

;;; This is a hack written by Hovav Shacham, author of the windmove package, so that 
;;; windmove will work in xemacs
;;;--- begin hack ---
 
;; simulate `window-edges' using `window-pixel-edges'; from
;; Nix , based on tapestry.el.
(defun window-edges (&amp;optional window)
  (let ((edges (window-pixel-edges window))
        tmp)
    (setq tmp edges)
    (setcar tmp (/ (car tmp) (face-width 'default)))
    (setq tmp (cdr tmp))
    (setcar tmp (/ (car tmp) (face-height 'default)))
    (setq tmp (cdr tmp))
    (setcar tmp (/ (car tmp) (face-width 'default)))
    (setq tmp (cdr tmp))
    (setcar tmp (/ (car tmp) (face-height 'default)))
    edges))
 
;; simulate `window-at' with `walk-windows'
(defun window-at (x y &amp;optional frame)
  (let ((f (if (null frame)
               (selected-frame)
             frame)))
    (let ((guess-wind nil))
      (walk-windows (function (lambda (w)
                                (let ((w-edges (window-edges w)))
                                  (if (and (eq f (window-frame w))
                                           ( (nth 2 w-edges) x)
                                           ( (nth 3 w-edges) y))
                                      (setq guess-wind w)))))
                    t                   ; walk minibuffers
                    t)                  ; walk all frames
      guess-wind)))
 
;; redo `windmove-coordinates-of-position' without compute-motion
(defun walk-screen-lines (lines goal)
  (cond
   ((&gt; (window-point) goal) (1- lines))
   ((= (window-point) goal) lines)
   (t (vertical-motion 1)
      (walk-screen-lines (1+ lines) goal))))
(defun windmove-coordinates-of-position (pos &amp;optional window)
  (let* ((w (if (null window)
                (selected-window)
              window))
         (b (window-buffer w)))
    (save-selected-window
      (select-window w)
      (save-excursion
        (let* ((y (progn (goto-char (window-start))
                         (walk-screen-lines 0 pos)))
               (x (- (progn (goto-char pos)
                            (current-column))
                     (progn (goto-char (window-start))
                            (vertical-motion y)
                            (current-column)))))
          (cons x y))))))            
 
;; for some reason, XEmacs is more conservative in reporting `frame-width'
;; and `frame-height'; we apparently need to get rid of the 1- in each.
(defun windmove-frame-edges (window)
  (let ((frame (if window
                   (window-frame window)
                 (selected-frame))))
    (let ((x-min 0)
          (y-min 0)
          (x-max (frame-width frame))
          (y-max (frame-height frame)))
      (list x-min y-min x-max y-max))))
 
;;;--- end hack --- 
 
Now, its good to set windmove's default key binding at XEmacs startup by adding the following like of code to the init.el file:
 
;;;Use shift-arrows to move from window to window
(windmove-default-keybindings)

good luck -rdb

17 E Jones // Jan 7, 2009 at 9:06 pm
This:
(windmove-default-keybindings ‘meta)

works great in standard windowed emacs, but it doesn’t work in console emacs (i.e. ‘emacs -nw’). To make it work in console mode, I have to use:
```
(global-set-key [(alt left)]  'windmove-left)
(global-set-key [(alt up)]    'windmove-up)
(global-set-key [(alt right)] 'windmove-right)
(global-set-key [(alt down)]  'windmove-down)
```
But this doesn’t work in standard (windowed) emacs. Does anyone know a good way to switch configuration based on whether I’m running emacs in non-windowed mode or not?

18 E Jones // Jan 7, 2009 at 10:55 pm

To answer my own question – here’s how to get it to work in X or console mode:

(if window-system
    (windmove-default-keybindings 'meta)
  (progn
    (global-set-key [(alt left)]  'windmove-left)
    (global-set-key [(alt up)]    'windmove-up)
    (global-set-key [(alt right)] 'windmove-right)
    (global-set-key [(alt down)]  'windmove-down)))

19 Erik Iverson // Jan 21, 2009 at 7:10 pm

As a side comment, I took a look at what commands I use most often using command-frequency.el over a few weeks’ time. I then looked at the default keybindings for C- and found that I never used C-t (among other single letter keybindings).

Therefore, I bound the other-window function (C-x o) to C-t, and haven’t looked back. It’s easy to get to any window just by holding down Control and hitting ‘t’ until I get there. I will try this out to see if I like it better though.

Thanks.
20 vinz // Jun 7, 2009 at 9:59 pm

Hey,
thank you so much E Jones ! that’s really powerfull, and that’s exactly what I was looking for.
Looking forward to learning new tips like this.
Thanks

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