I wrote about repeat mode. My take was that it was a way repeating certain commands without having to retype their, possibly, complex prefixes. All of that is true but as Karthik informed me in a comment, there is much, much more to repeat mode than simply repeating commands.
It is a way, he says, of grouping a set of related commands together into a sort of mode. Thus, there is more to Ctrl+x } than simply repeating the enlarge window command. Once you type Ctrl+x you can type any of {, }, ^, v to resize the window in any direction. The Ctrl+x enables a keymap with those four single keys to resize the current window, defining, in effect, a “resize window mode”.
Four years ago, Karthik wrote a long post that explains all this and, at least on an intuitive level, how it works. My first thought was to add an update to my post that pointed to Karthik’s and I did that but then I thought that his post was so good that I should devote a new post to it so that anyone who missed it the first time would see it.
Repeat mode really is an excellent facility—Karthik says it’s a cornerstone of his Emacs usage—and every Emacser should be familiar with it. If nothing else, it’s worth enabling repeat mode so that you can use the built in repeat maps. You can see what they are by running the command describe-repeat-maps.
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