I wrote recently about my enthusiasm for the elfeed feed reader. Here is a microscopic tweak to the way elfeed search filters work to better suit my use.

By default, if I switch to a bookmarked filter to view e.g. my feeds tagged with Emacs (as discussed in the previous post), and then hit s to run a live filter, I can type something like “Xah” to dynamically narrow the list of stories to those containing that string. The only problem is I actually have to type ” Xah”, i.e. with a space before the filter text, since it is appended to the filter that is already present “+unread +emacs” in this case.

Since life is too short to type extra spaces, I wrote a simple wrapper for the elfeed filter command:

;;insert space before elfeed filter
(defun bjm/elfeed-search-live-filter-space ()
  "Insert space when running elfeed filter"
  (interactive)
  (let ((elfeed-search-filter (concat elfeed-search-filter " ")))
    (elfeed-search-live-filter)))

I add this to the elfeed keybindings when I initialise the package

(use-package elfeed
  :ensure t
  :bind (:map elfeed-search-mode-map
              ("A" . bjm/elfeed-show-all)
              ("E" . bjm/elfeed-show-emacs)
              ("D" . bjm/elfeed-show-daily)
              ("/" . bjm/elfeed-search-live-filter-space)
              ("q" . bjm/elfeed-save-db-and-bury)))

and now I can use / to filter my articles without needing the extra space.