Kill buffers in *Buffer List* by file path

Question

I have a lot of buffers in *Buffer List*.

    a.hs      1708 Haskell          ~/src/my-project/src/a.hs
    b.hs       581 Haskell          ~/src/my-project/src/b.hs
    c.hs      1711 Haskell          ~/src/other-project/tests/c.hs
    d.hs       687 Haskell          ~/src/random-project/d.hs

Is there a convenient way to mark rows (maybe similarly to Dired) using patterns or regex? The intention is to mark/kill all buffers that refer to files in my-project.

Answer 1

I join others in recommending Ibuffer, which is similar to the classic buffer list (Buffer Menu mode) but has a lot more features. (That's if you're not using something even fancier like Ido or Helm.) M-x ibuffer opens the buffer list in the current window, like M-x buffer-menu. M-x ibuffer-other-window opens the buffer list in another window (like the default C-x C-b) and (unlike C-x C-b) selects it.

Ibuffer has many commands that are similar to Dired. You can use d to flag the current item for deletion and x to actually delete all items flagged for deletion. You can use m to put a mark on the current item and D to delete the items that are marked (with a confirmation prompt). There are also features to mark buffers based on their properties, but they're slightly different from Dired's. In Ibuffer, use % f to mark buffers by their file name (that's the full path including directories). So you can delete my-project buffers with

% f ~/src/my-project/ RET D y

Another possible approach which works both in the classic C-x C-b Buffer Menu and in Ibuffer is to sort the buffer list by names. You can then quickly flag consecutive items for deletion. In the classic buffer list, use S (M-x tabulated-list-sort) while the cursor is at the beginning of a file name (the lines are sorted based on what's to the right of the cursor). In IBuffer, use s f to sort by file name (and s v to go back to the default sort by recency).