upcase-word, you so silly

Do you know what the most frequently used Emacs commands are? I can confirm by my own experience that they are next-line and previous-line (in that order). So why do M-u - upcase-word , M-l - downcase-word , and M-c - capitalize-word have such terrible synergy with Emacs's best commands?

No, upcase-word , this is not what I had in mind:

Learn basic key s troke commands Overview of Emacs features at gnu.org M-u Learn basic keySTROKE commands Overview of Emacs features at gnu.org

If you say:

But how did you get the cursor in such a crazy position in the first place? You should have used M-b / M-f .

Well, I got there with previous-line - one of the best Emacs commands!

Resolve the *-word malarkey with defadvice

Here are some simple advice commands that I've just rolled:

( defadvice upcase-word ( before upcase-word-advice activate ) ( unless ( looking-back "\\b" ) ( backward-word ))) ( defadvice downcase-word ( before downcase-word-advice activate ) ( unless ( looking-back "\\b" ) ( backward-word ))) ( defadvice capitalize-word ( before capitalize-word-advice activate ) ( unless ( looking-back "\\b" ) ( backward-word )))

Small explanation to the Elisp novices:

before upcase-word is called, execute the body of upcase-word-advice unless we are at the beginning of the word backward-word once to move to the beginning of the word

I'm intentionally not using the newest advice system here, since not everyone has yet upgraded to Emacs 24.4. In fact, I saw this gem today at Stack Overflow: