Until I noticed that I was hardly using everything it has to offer, Leo Liu’s easy-kill was one of the packages I used the most. Specifically, I wasn’t really taking advantage of its capability of repeating mark commands, nor its keys to modify the current selection. Although it doesn’t seem actively maintained this day, check it out if you want to extend your mark/kill actions.

As for me, Paul Landes’s mark-thing-at has become my best pal when it comes to marking. Granted, it’s way less powerful than easy-kill, but combine it with Emacs regular key bindings for killing and there is nothing more that I need.

You will find mark-thing-at on MELPA, and if you follow my lead, you can enable mark-thing-at-mode and be happy with it. Note that if you do not configure mark-thing-at-keymap-prefix you end up with C-x m as a prefix for all the mark-* commands now available at your fingertips. This means that you will lose the key binding for compose-mail, but I’m fine with it.

Whatever the prefix you end up with just append C-h to it and you will see the many commands at your disposal. You probably won’t need them all, but it’s good to have a nice way to leverage these marking facilities.

Next time we will explore a better completion system for shell-mode.

Stay safe.