RE: repeat-on-final-keystroke

["Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

    > editing tens of different buffers, which is typical for me

    For that many buffers it seems like iswitchb would work better if you
    could use a naming convention that made the names differ more at the
    beginning of the string than at the end.

Hack! Cough!

    This might not be convenient
    unless you could get used to reading the buffer names backwards
     a l'arabe
    (i.e. "h.sfed" for "defs.h" by performing reverse-string of file name to
    get buffer name).

In that case it _would_ be convenient? Argggh!

    You can also filter out *Help, *Info, and other
    read-only buffers with iswitch...

Try Icicles. It's designed to be useful with large numbers of completion
candidates (in this case, buffer names). No need to jump through hoops to
finagle buffer names so they have prefixes that follow some convention, read
their names backward, or any such witchcraft.

In addition to the prefix matching of vanilla Emacs, Icicles gives you
apropos-style matching. You can 1) match any substring of the name (in fact,
you can match any regexp against the name), and you can 2) cycle among those
matches. With a large number of candidates, you typically use apropos
matching to narrow the choices and then you might cycle among the remaining
candidates using a single key (e.g. `next').

Does "regexp matching" sound scary, complicated, difficult? 1) Don't forget
that _any_ string of letters, numbers and such is also a regexp, so this
gives you substring matching without doing anything special. 2) With
Icicles, you can use one simple regexp (e.g. just a substring) to filter,
and then use another simple regexp (e.g. another substring) to filter
further, and so on - any number of times. This is just like doing grep plant
*.txt | grep food | grep mineral: you can find multiple substrings of a
buffer name (or file name or...) that might appear in any order within the
name.

Here is the doc (which has a link to the library files):
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/Icicles. Have fun!