wizard.el - A Lightweight suite of useful Emacs functions

• Author: James Cherti <https://www.jamescherti.com/>
• License: GPL 3.0 or later

The wizard Emacs package provides a collection of useful Emacs functions.

The philosophy behind this package is simple: use the built-in functions Emacs already provides to do what complex third-party packages do.

Instead of rewriting complex logic from scratch or adding heavy external dependencies, wizard uses built-in Emacs functions to deliver practical features. (For example, to highlighting symbols uses the built-in hi-lock)

• Symbol highlight: (wizard-toggle-highlight-at-point) toggles highlighting for the symbol under your cursor or the active selection. It is a lightweight alternative to the highlight-symbol package.
• Native TODO highlighting: (wizard-hl-todo-mode 1) automatically highlights codetags TODO, FIXME, BUG, NOTE, etc. in your buffers using custom font-lock rules. This mode is an alternative to the hl-todo package that uses Emacs built-in hi-lock.

• True hard reset: (wizard-reload-current-buffer) completely reloads the current buffer from disk. Unlike the standard revert-buffer, this command kills and reopens the file, instantly purging broken states, glitched minor modes, or out-of-sync LSP servers. It silently saves your work first and takes an exact snapshot of your window coordinates to restore your point, window start, and pixel-exact scroll position. Your layout will not shift by a single pixel.
• Enhanced buffer cloning: (wizard-clone-indirect-buffer) and (wizard-clone-and-switch-to-indirect-buffer) improve the built-in clone function. They preserve your point position, window start, and horizontal scroll. Evil users also benefit, as these functions prevent Evil mode search highlights from bleeding into newly cloned indirect buffers. Switch back easily with (wizard-switch-to-base-buffer).

• Paste with matching indentation: (wizard-paste-indented) pastes text from your clipboard while automatically matching the current line's indentation. It removes the minimal common leading whitespace from the clipboard content and aligns it perfectly with your cursor.
• Copy unindented text: (wizard-copy-unindented) copies the active region while stripping away minimal common leading whitespace. If no region is active, it copies the current line without its leading indentation.
• Shift regions easily: (wizard-move-region-up) and (wizard-move-region-down) move the currently selected text up or down. These commands maintain the active selection after moving and support both standard Emacs regions and Evil mode visual states. Setting the wizard-move-region-skip-invisible variable to a non-nil value ensures that moving the region skips over hidden or invisible lines.

• Noise-free Grep: (wizard-grep) runs Grep with a clean, empty prompt. Unlike the built-in M-x grep which pre-fills the minibuffer with the entire shell command, this command lets you type only your search arguments. The base command is prepended automatically, reducing visual noise and preventing accidental edits to your flags.
• Quick symbol replacement: (wizard-replace-symbol-at-point) lets you instantly replace all occurrences of the symbol under your cursor with a specified string. (You can configure replacements to execute across the entire file, ignoring any active narrowing restrictions, by setting wizard-replace-ignore-narrowing to a non-nil value.)

• Indentation jumping: (wizard-point-backward-to-lower-indentation) and (wizard-point-forward-to-lower-indentation) move your point to the nearest line with a lower indentation level, making it easy to navigate out of nested code blocks.
• Empty line jumping: (wizard-point-backward-to-empty-line) and (wizard-point-forward-to-empty-line) quickly jump to the nearest blank line.
• Ignore invisible text: Setting wizard-point-ignore-invisible to a non-nil value allows these navigation commands to skip folded or hidden text.

To install wizard using the built-in :vc keyword:

(use-package wizard
  :vc (:url "https://github.com/jamescherti/wizard.el"
       :rev :newest))

To install wizard with straight.el:

1. If it hasn't already been done, add the straight.el bootstrap code to your init file.
2. Add the following code to the Emacs init file:

(use-package wizard
  :straight (wizard
             :type git
             :host github
             :repo "jamescherti/wizard.el"))

You can allow replacements to process the entire file even if you are currently narrowed to a specific block of code:

(setq wizard-replace-ignore-narrowing t)

You can customize the codetags that get highlighted by modifying the wizard-hl-todo-keywords variable. By default, it highlights TODO, FIXME, BUG, XXX (with a warning face, generally red) and NOTE, HACK, DONE (with a doc face, generally green).

To enable this feature globally, add the following to your Emacs configuration:

(wizard-hl-todo-mode 1)

This mode is an alternative to the hl-todo package that uses Emacs built-in hi-lock.

The functions (wizard-toggle-highlight-at-point) and (wizard-replace-symbol-at-point) depend on built-in functions that can be customized via the following variables:

The case-fold-search buffer-local variable determines the behavior of (wizard-toggle-highlight-at-point) and (wizard-replace-symbol-at-point). When set to t (default), both symbol highlighting and searches become case-insensitive, matching symbols regardless of case. When set to nil, they become case-sensitive, matching symbols only when the case exactly matches the text in the buffer.

Example:

;; Setting case-fold-search to nil enables case-sensitive symbol highlighting
;; and search/replace
(setq-default case-fold-search nil)

When non-nil, the case-replace variable ensures that (wizard-replace-symbol-at-point) preserves the case of the original text during replacements.

Example:

;; t means (wizard-replace-symbol-at-point) should preserve case in
;; replacements.
(setq case-replace t)

To configure (wizard-grep) to use ripgrep, add the following snippet to your init file:

(setq grep-use-null-device nil)
(setq grep-command-position nil)
(setq grep-command
      (concat "rg"
              ;; Include hidden files
              " --hidden"
              ;; Exclude VC
              " -g !.git -g !.svn -g !.hg"
              ;; Default
              " --null --line-buffered --color=never --max-columns=1000"
              " --path-separator / --smart-case --no-heading"
              " --with-filename --line-number --search-zip"))

;; Synchronize grep-template with the custom ripgrep command defined above.
;; The <R> and <F> tokens serve as dynamic placeholders that Emacs replaces
;; with the search regular expression and target file patterns at runtime.
(setq grep-template (concat grep-command " <R> <F>"))

The wizard Emacs package has been written by James Cherti and is distributed under terms of the GNU General Public License version 3, or, at your choice, any later version.

Copyright (C) 2024-2026 James Cherti

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program.

• wizard.el @GitHub

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