When I'm working in Emacs I use the *scratch* buffer quite a bit. I find it especially useful if I'm working on some Emacs Lisp code, but I also find it handy as a place to drop something I want to retrieve soon, or a quick note that I want to refer back to soon; sometimes I even paste some text there and copy it back just to strip the formatting from it before using it elsewhere1.

Because of this, for a long time, I carried a little function around that I had bound to M-s to quickly take me to the *scratch* buffer. Then, I think around the time I did the follow-up revamp of my Emacs configuration, I turned it into a little package for my own use called itch.el.

The command (itch-scratch-buffer) is simple enough: run it and I get switched to my *scratch* buffer. If I run it with a prefix argument it switches to *scratch* and resets the content back to the initial-scratch-message.

More recently I've found that I'm wanting a scratch buffer that is for writing Markdown. Like many folk I use it a lot for documentation, and of course I also use it for this blog. I also use it heavily for keeping notes in Obsidian2. So, often, I find myself switching to a temporary buffer (*foo* or something), setting it to markdown-mode, and then writing what I need.

So yesterday I finally cracked and added itch-markdown-scratch-buffer. It's just like itch-scratch-buffer, only it creates a *scratch: Markdown* buffer, using the same clear-if-prefix rule.

So now I've got this bound to M-S-s and I can faff around just a little less when I want a Markdown scratchpad.

  1. On macOS at least, I find the "paste without formatting" support of some applications to be really inconsistent; a quick layover in the *scratch* buffer does the trick every time. ↩

  2. Yes, I know, I should be using Org, but sadly it's just never clicked for me, and I also find good syncing and having a consistent application on mobile and desktop are important. ↩