My text editor of choice is Emacs. Its extensibility is a major contributor to this preference. The ease of adding additional functionality means you can customize it to your liking. You should not go overboard and change too much of the default behavior but you should feel free to add additional features.

I recently found myself often editing a file in emacs and then switching to a terminal and running a bash script to see how the output changed. This is part of my work flow for shutting down or starting new server processes. Since this is something I’ll be doing quite frequently in the future, I wrote some Emacs Lisp to run the shell script and display the output in a temporary buffer. With this function in place I no longer have to toggle to a terminal and run a command.

I’m picky and I wanted this output buffer to have the same behavior as the help buffer. That is, I wanted to be able to close the buffer by just hitting the letter q. It took me a while to figure out how to do this so I thought I would share it here in hopes it might benefit others.

First I’ll show the code and then I’ll explain what it is doing.

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(defun blog-example ()
  (interactive)
  (with-output-to-temp-buffer "*blog-example*"
    (shell-command "echo This is an example"
                   "*blog-example*"
                   "*Messages*")
    (pop-to-buffer "*blog-example*")))

The above snippet defines a function named blog-example. It takes no arguments and is interactive (as indicated by the second line calling interactive). This call to interactive makes blog-example available to be called interactively, meaning you can call it after triggering M-x. This is probably a simplification of what is actually does, so if you care the documentation is available here.

After the call to interactive we hit the core of this function, the call to with-output-to-temp-buffer. This function a buffer name as a first argument and additional forms. The output of those forms is put into the named buffer.

The form I’m passing to with-output-to-temp-buffer is a call to shell-command. shell-command will run echo This is an example synchronously and redirect stdout to *blog-example* and stderr to *Messages*.

The final line opens the buffer and switches focus to it. Now you can look at the output and when you are ready to return just hit q.

This is a simplified example but it shows how easy it is to extend Emacs functionality. Doing something similar to this made a task I do frequently more pleasant.

My use case is a bit more complicated and involves saving the buffer I’m currently editing and then running a command against the saved file. Below is some sample code that does something similar.

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(defun example2 ()
  (interactive)
  (when (and (buffer-modified-p)
             (y-or-n-p (format "Save file %s? " (buffer-file-name))))
    (save-buffer))
  (with-output-to-temp-buffer "*blog-example*"
    (shell-command (concat "wc -l"
                           " "
                           (expand-file-name (buffer-file-name)))
                   "*blog-example*"
                   "*Messages*")
    (pop-to-buffer "*blog-example*")))