18.18 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, the ‘ File’ menu includes a submenu containing a list of recently opened files. M-x recentf-save-list saves the current recentf-list to a file, and M-x recentf-edit-list edits it.

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.