20.18 Convenience Features for Finding Files

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

If you enable Recentf mode, with M-x recentf-mode, Emacs maintains a list of recently opened files. To open a file from this list, use the M-x recentf-open command. When this mode is enabled, the ‘File’ menu will include a submenu that you can use to visit one of these files. M-x recentf-save-list saves the current recentf-list to a file, and M-x recentf-edit-list edits it.

If you use remote files, you might also consider customizing remote-file-name-access-timeout, which is the number of seconds after which the check whether a remote file shall be used in Recentf is stopped. This prevents Emacs being blocked.

The M-x ffap command generalizes find-file with more powerful heuristic defaults (see Finding Files and URLs at Point), 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.