CODEWITHSUNDEEP
emacs
sam boosalis
sam boosalis

Reputation: 1977

Emacs: list the names of every interactive command

i.e. anything that can be run from M-x. including any C built-ins, user-defined, etc.

e.g. list-all-commands

'(... about-emacs ... zap-to-char ...)

it must be accessible, given behavior like autocomplete for M-x.

from How to print all the defined variables in emacs?, we can access all symbols:

(pp-eval-expression
   (quote (loop for x being the symbols
      if (boundp x)
      collect (symbol-name x))))

but most of those are not interactive functions.

EDIT:

sigh there is a point, in fact. By sending this list to the speech recognition engine, after tokenizing on the hyphen, and symbol-name and whatever, I should be able to speak all but the most strangely-written commands (Dragon NaturallySpeaking is good about that). without this list, recognition accuracy would decrease, and I would have to manually hardcode keyboard shortcuts for any commands I wanted, or deal with constant frustration at misrecognitions.

that is what I need. but, I might also want to write my own autocomplete behavior; or compare the similarity of the names that different modes provide; or to discover new commands that are lexically similar to common commands I use (e.g. using align-regex often might suggest align-entire); or to analyze any inconsistencies in naming movement through different regions (e.g. beginning-of-line versus up-list); or I already looked at say ido, and wanted to see if there was a standard function to build the data structure it uses to efficiently query; or I feel like benchmarking it; or maybe I'm just curious. there are lots of uses for this.

the whole point of Emacs is that behavior is exposed to the programmer, and not just through the UI.

Can you take back your vote to close now? I think it's not "unclear what I'm asking", and if it is suggest points of clarification.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 951

Answers (3)

Drew
Drew

Reputation: 30701

(let ((cmds  ()))
  (mapatoms (lambda (s) (when (commandp s) (push s cmds))))
  cmds)

Upvotes: 4

mkiever
mkiever

Reputation: 891

M-x space should give you a buffer with a complete list of completions. Use C-x o (perhaps multiple times) to switch from the mini-buffer to the completion buffer and copy its contents.

The elisp function doing that completion is found in simple.el in the function read-extended-command:

(completing-read
 (concat (cond
          ((eq current-prefix-arg '-) "- ")
          ((and (consp current-prefix-arg)
                (eq (car current-prefix-arg) 4)) "C-u ")
          ((and (consp current-prefix-arg)
                (integerp (car current-prefix-arg)))
           (format "%d " (car current-prefix-arg)))
          ((integerp current-prefix-arg)
           (format "%d " current-prefix-arg)))
         ;; This isn't strictly correct if `execute-extended-command'
         ;; is bound to anything else (e.g. [menu]).
         ;; It could use (key-description (this-single-command-keys)),
         ;; but actually a prompt other than "M-x" would be confusing,
         ;; because "M-x" is a well-known prompt to read a command
         ;; and it serves as a shorthand for "Extended command: ".
         "M-x ")
 obarray 'commandp t nil 'extended-command-history)))

Upvotes: 2

npostavs
npostavs

Reputation: 5027

You can check if a symbol is an interactive command with commandp:

(pp-eval-expression
 '(loop for x being the symbols
        if (commandp x) collect x))

Upvotes: 3

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