Cycling Through Emacs Buffers Easily

Once you have more buffers (files) open than windows in Emacs, then having a quick way to cycle through buffers is invaluable. Even with 4 windows open, I still find myself using IBuffer, C-c C-x, many times.

Sometimes I just want to switch between the current and previous buffer in the same window. So this is how I tweaked my Emacs configuration (based on Emacs Live) to cycle through buffers.

Cycling through buffers

Emacs has two functions to move through buffers in the current window, next-buffer and previous-buffer. These can be called in the usual way using Meta-x:

M-x next-buffer
M-x previous-buffer

Using these functions is quick than firing up an IBuffer, however if we create some good keybindings then we can cycle buffers even faster.

Creating keybindings

I already have several keybindings defined in my Emacs Live personal pack, so I simply add two more keybindings. The file I put my keybindings in is called ~/.live-packs/jr0cket-pack/config/keybindings.el and these bindings are loaded by adding the following line to ~/.live-packs/jr0cket-pack/init.el

(live-load-config-file "keybindings.el")

The key combination I decided to use was Ctrl - PageUp for previous button and Ctrl - PageDown for the next buffer.

;; Set keybindings for cycling buffers
(global-set-key [C-prior] 'previous-buffer)
(global-set-key [C-next] 'next-buffer)

The PageUp key is referenced by the name prior and the PageDown key is referenced by the name next.

Thank you.
@jr0cket

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