In my current job, I do a fair amount of teaching about web development. Usually these are quick 10 minute lessons, and often times it is easiest to explain a concept with a code snippet. Being an emacs user, I typically open up a new temp buffer, set the major-mode js2-mode/web-mode/css-mode (for javascript, html/velocity/jsp and css respectively) and start typing. After doing this several times, the several steps became irritating. It seemed to me that emacs is all about customization, and I should be able to open an arbitrary buffer with one command. Seeing this as a perfect excuse to further enhance my elisp skills, I came up with the function below. Now I can just call this function1 and type in the mode-type and a buffer with all the correct settings is loaded.
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(defun create-scratch-buffer ()
"creates a scratch buffer of specified type"
(interactive)
(let (newbuffer mode-type)
(setq mode-type (read-from-minibuffer "scratch mode: "))
(setq newbuffer (get-buffer-create (concat mode-type "-scratch")))
(switch-to-buffer newbuffer)
(funcall (intern (concat mode-type "-mode")))))
There are probably many ways this function could be improved, but it sure is satisfying when I am able to improve my workflow using a tool that I wrote myself.
I bound this to C-c C-s b, for Create Scratch Buffer, it may or may not be appropriate for your keymap setup. ↩