Álvaro Ramírez

Quickly finding related built-in elisp functions (without prefixes) can sometimes take a little poking around.

Some modern and predictable built-in exceptions I now reach out to are:

• map.el for key/values, alists, hash-tables and arrays (built-in as of Emacs 25.1).
• seq.el for sequence manipulation functions (built-in as of Emacs 25.1).
• subr-x.el has a handful of string functions (built-in as of Emacs 24.4).
• let-alist.el wonderful syntax for alists, great for json (built-in as of Emacs 25.1).

If you don't mind reaching out to third-party libs (you likely have some of these already installed), here are some modern, predictable, and well-documented ones that always get me out of trouble:

• s.el string manipulation.
• f.el file/path handling.
• dash.el for lists.
• ht.el for hashtables.
• ts.el for date and time.

I'm happy with built-ins like map.el, seq.el, and let-alist.el. subr-x.el is also pretty nice, although not as full-featured as third-party s.el.

Am I missing out on other modern built-ins or third-party libraries?

UPDATE: Added a handful of newly discovered libraries plus suggestions by Daniel Martín (thanks!). Not tried any of these myself.

• rtree.el binary tree that stores ranges (Built-in).
• ov.el simple way to manipulate overlay.
• Toby Cubitt's libraries (heap, overlays, queue, avl-tree, trie, dict-tree, etc).
• shadchen.el pattern-matching.
• m-buffer.el buffers.
• esxml.el xml and html.
• a.el associative structures.
• asoc.el association list library.
• yk-color.el linear RGB color manipulation.

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