You might also want to have a look to the transpose section in the Emacs manual.
Essentially:
C-t
Transpose two characters (transpose-chars).
M-t
Transpose two words (transpose-words).
C-M-t
Transpose two balanced expressions (transpose-sexps).
C-x C-t
Transpose two lines (transpose-lines).
I have written a couple of interactive functions for moving lines up/down:
;; move line up
(defun move-line-up ()
(interactive)
(transpose-lines 1)
(previous-line 2))
(global-set-key [(control shift up)] 'move-line-up)
;; move line down
(defun move-line-down ()
(interactive)
(next-line 1)
(transpose-lines 1)
(previous-line 1))
(global-set-key [(control shift down)] 'move-line-down)
The keybindings are IntelliJ IDEA style, but you can use anything you want. I should probably implement some functions that operate on regions as well.
Here is my snippet to move the current line or the lines spanned by the active region. It respects cursor position and highlighted region. And it won't break lines when the region doesn't begin/end at line border(s). (It is inspired by eclipse; I found the eclipse way more convenient than 'transpose-lines'.)
;; move the line(s) spanned by the active region up/down (line transposing)
;; \{\{{
(defun move-lines (n)
(let ((beg) (end) (keep))
(if mark-active
(save-excursion
(setq keep t)
(setq beg (region-beginning)
end (region-end))
(goto-char beg)
(setq beg (line-beginning-position))
(goto-char end)
(setq end (line-beginning-position 2)))
(setq beg (line-beginning-position)
end (line-beginning-position 2)))
(let ((offset (if (and (mark t)
(and (>= (mark t) beg)
(< (mark t) end)))
(- (point) (mark t))))
(rewind (- end (point))))
(goto-char (if (< n 0) beg end))
(forward-line n)
(insert (delete-and-extract-region beg end))
(backward-char rewind)
(if offset (set-mark (- (point) offset))))
(if keep
(setq mark-active t
deactivate-mark nil))))
(defun move-lines-up (n)
"move the line(s) spanned by the active region up by N lines."
(interactive "*p")
(move-lines (- (or n 1))))
(defun move-lines-down (n)
"move the line(s) spanned by the active region down by N lines."
(interactive "*p")
(move-lines (or n 1)))
It works exactly like eclipse Alt+Up/Down for single lines, as well as for selected region lines!
In addition to that it allows you to move words with Alt+Left/Right
This is exactly what you're looking for! And it is even available from the ELPA repos!
Other solutions never worked for me. Some of them were buggy(transposing lines while changing their order, wtf?) and some of them were moving exactly selected region, leaving unselected parts of the lines on their positions. But drag-stuff works exactly like in eclipse!
And even more! You can try selecting a region and using Alt+Left/Right ! This will transpose selected region by one character to the left or right. Amazing!
I use the smart-shift package (in Melpa) for this. By default it rebinds C-C <arrow> to move a line or region. It moves horizontally by a major-mode-specific amount (e.g. c-basic-offset or python-indent-offset). Works on regions also.