Re: Opening multiple files in a single buffer?

[Perry Smith]

> On Jun 13, 2020, at 2:22 PM, Gregory Heytings <ghe@sdf.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> 
>>> Another application would be to open all the code files in a directory into 
>>> a single buffer, and do replace-string or query-replace on all of them, to 
>>> rename variables, for example.
>> 
>> We have a special Dired command to do such renaming.
>> 
> 
> Indeed, but that's not the point.  As I said what I'm proposing is a way to 
> do some things more easily (for some users).  Everything that could be done 
> with such a feature can already be done in other ways.  I don't use the 
> menu-bar, the tool-bar, customize, or the menus on the mode-line. But I do 
> not consider that they are useless.  All these features make it possible to 
> do things more easily (for some users), that can already be done in other 
> ways.

Before you decide to dive into this, I would suggest doing a test run by 
writing a simple script to cat the files together with a separator and edit 
that file with something like search and replace or bounce around in various 
places making edits.  I have vague memories that when buffers get extremely 
big, emacs slows down considerably but my memories are not clear enough to 
recall the exact circumstances.  Perhaps one of the emacs maintainers can jump 
in and comment.  Is emacs going to be more efficient with several “small” 
buffers rather than one extremely large buffer.  Some of the people commenting 
are wanting to load up an entire project into a single buffer.  As I recall, 
that is going to be very unfriendly to use.