rlazo's blog

Insert a path into the current buffer

Sometimes I need to insert into a buffer a path (e.g. /home/user/.emacs) and I want to use emacs’ excellent completion capabilities. It turns out to be pretty easy to implement this function in elisp. Here is the snippet:

(defun insert-path ()
  "Inserts a path into the buffer with completion"
  (interactive)
  (insert (expand-file-name (read-file-name "Path: "))))

As always, any comments on the code above are more than welcome

Another way of doing it suggested by Peter Mielke is:

(defun insert-path (file)
 "insert file"
 (interactive "FPath: ")
 (insert (expand-file-name file)))

I think this is a better option because uses interactive built-in support for file input rather than using the read-file-name function. Thank you for the tip Peter