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### 18.17 Convenience Features for Finding Files

In this section, we introduce some convenient facilities for finding recently-opened files, reading file names from a buffer, and viewing image files.

If you enable Recentf mode, with `M-x recentf-mode`, the ‘`File`’ menu includes a submenu containing a list of recently opened files. `M-x recentf-save-list` saves the current `recent-file-list` to a file, and `M-x recentf-edit-list` edits it.

The `M-x ffap` command generalizes `find-file` with more powerful heuristic defaults (see FFAP), often based on the text at point. Partial Completion mode offers other features extending `find-file`, which can be used with `ffap`. See Completion Options.

Visiting image files automatically selects Image mode. In this major mode, you can type `C-c C-c` (`image-toggle-display`) to toggle between displaying the file as an image in the Emacs buffer, and displaying its underlying text (or raw byte) representation. Displaying the file as an image works only if Emacs is compiled with support for displaying such images. If the displayed image is wider or taller than the frame, the usual point motion keys (`C-f`, `C-p`, and so forth) cause different parts of the image to be displayed. You can press `n` (`image-next-file`) and `p` (`image-previous-file`) to visit the next image file and the previous image file in the same directory, respectively.

If the image can be animated, the command `RET` (`image-toggle-animation`) starts or stops the animation. Animation plays once, unless the option `image-animate-loop` is non-`nil`. With `f` (`image-next-frame`) and `b` (`image-previous-frame`) you can step through the individual frames. Both commands accept a numeric prefix to step through several frames at once. You can go to a specific frame with `F` (`image-goto-frame`). Frames are indexed from 1. Typing `a +` (`image-increase-speed`) increases the speed of the animation, `a -` (`image-decrease-speed`) decreases it, and `a r` (`image-reverse-speed`) reverses it. The command `a 0` (`image-reset-speed`) resets the speed to the original value.

If Emacs was compiled with support for the ImageMagick library, it can use ImageMagick to render a wide variety of images. The variable `imagemagick-enabled-types` lists the image types that Emacs may render using ImageMagick; each element in the list should be an internal ImageMagick name for an image type, as a symbol or an equivalent string (e.g., `BMP` for `.bmp` images). To enable ImageMagick for all possible image types, change `imagemagick-enabled-types` to `t`. The variable `imagemagick-types-inhibit` lists the image types which should never be rendered using ImageMagick, regardless of the value of `imagemagick-enabled-types` (the default list includes types like `C` and `HTML`, which ImageMagick can render as an image but Emacs should not). To disable ImageMagick entirely, change `imagemagick-types-inhibit` to `t`.

The Image-Dired package can also be used to view images as thumbnails. See Image-Dired.

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