A friend of mine just asked me for advice to tweak some Emacs features, and I think that’s really typical of using Emacs: rather than getting used to the way things are shipped to you, when using Emacs, you start wanting to adapt the tools to the way you want things to be working instead. And you can call that the awesome!

In this case we’re talking about the M-x compile and M-x recompile functions. My friend bound the former to <f11> and wanted that C-u f11 do a recompile with the exact same command line as the previous compile command.

Well, to be honest, I didn’t know about M-x recompile until after I wrote the following function, made to trigger another compile with the last command used if using C-u.

(defvar cyb-compile-last-command nil)
(defvar cyb-compile-command-history nil)

(defun cyb-compile (arg)
  "Compile with given command, optionally recompile with last command"
  (interactive "P")
  (if arg
      (progn
	;; arg given: compile with last command
	(unless cyb-compile-last-command
	  (error "Can't recompile yet, no known last command"))
	(compile cyb-compile-last-command))
    ;; else branch, no arg given, ask for a command
    (let ((command
	   (read-string
	    "Compile with command: "
            "make -k" 'cyb-compile-command-history "make -k")))
      (setq cyb-compile-last-command command)
      (compile command))))

(global-set-key (kbd "<f11>") 'cyb-compile)

With that little Emacs Lisp code we’re driving Emacs the way we want to be working, and that’s great! You can see it was a quick hack in that if you wanted to use the function non interactively it would still prompt for the command to use to compile, when Emacs Lisp interactive special form would allow us to implement something way smarter here. Also if we wanted to spend some more time on that feature, we should probably tweak the error condition to be asking for the command rather than just complaining, that would certainly be more useful.

Exercise left to the reader, rewrite using recompile rather than reinventing it in a hurry! Beware of call-interactively though. Oh and fix the aforementioned infelicities, too.

To conclude, we see that writing Emacs Lisp code to fix a usability problem in a hurry is a great force of Emacs, and that we’re provided with the necessary tool set so as to be able to reach completeness if we wanted to do so.