18.17 Convenience Features for Finding Files

In this section, we introduce some convenient facilities for finding recently-opened files, reading file names from a buffer, and viewing image files.

If you enable Recentf mode, with M-x recentf-mode, the ‘File’ menu includes a submenu containing a list of recently opened files. M-x recentf-save-list saves the current recent-file-list to a file, and M-x recentf-edit-list edits it.

The M-x ffap command generalizes find-file with more powerful heuristic defaults (see FFAP), often based on the text at point. Partial Completion mode offers other features extending find-file, which can be used with ffap. See Completion Options.

Visiting image files automatically selects Image mode. In this major mode, you can type C-c C-c (image-toggle-display) to toggle between displaying the file as an image in the Emacs buffer, and displaying its underlying text (or raw byte) representation. Displaying the file as an image works only if Emacs is compiled with support for displaying such images. If the displayed image is wider or taller than the frame, the usual point motion keys (C-f, C-p, and so forth) cause different parts of the image to be displayed. You can press n (image-next-file) and p (image-previous-file) to visit the next image file and the previous image file in the same directory, respectively.

If the image can be animated, the command RET (image-toggle-animation) starts or stops the animation. Animation plays once, unless the option image-animate-loop is non-nil. With f (image-next-frame) and b (image-previous-frame) you can step through the individual frames. Both commands accept a numeric prefix to step through several frames at once. You can go to a specific frame with F (image-goto-frame). Typing a + (image-increase-speed) increases the speed of the animation, a - (image-decrease-speed) decreases it, and a r (image-reverse-speed) reverses it. The command a 0 (image-reset-speed) resets the speed to the original value.

If Emacs was compiled with support for the ImageMagick library, it can use ImageMagick to render a wide variety of images. The variable imagemagick-enabled-types lists the image types that Emacs may render using ImageMagick; each element in the list should be an internal ImageMagick name for an image type, as a symbol or an equivalent string (e.g., BMP for .bmp images). To enable ImageMagick for all possible image types, change imagemagick-enabled-types to t. The variable imagemagick-types-inhibit lists the image types which should never be rendered using ImageMagick, regardless of the value of imagemagick-enabled-types (the default list includes types like C and HTML, which ImageMagick can render as an “image” but Emacs should not). To disable ImageMagick entirely, change imagemagick-types-inhibit to t.

The Image-Dired package can also be used to view images as thumbnails. See Image-Dired.