Álvaro Ramírez

Just the other day, Graham Voysey filed an escaping bug against dwim-shell-command. Once he verified the the fix, he also posted two uses of dwim-shell-command-on-marked-files. I've made some small tweaks, but here's the gist of it:

(defun dwim-shell-commands-feh-marked-files ()
  "View all marked files with feh."
  (interactive)
  (dwim-shell-command-on-marked-files
   "View with feh"
   "feh --auto-zoom --scale-down '<<*>>'"
   :silent-success t
   :utils "feh"))

(defun dwim-shell-commands-dragon-marked-files ()
  "Share all marked files with dragon."
  (interactive)
  (dwim-shell-command-on-marked-files
   "View with dragon"
   "dragon --on-top '<<*>>'"
   :silent-success t
   :utils "dragon"))

I love seeing what others get up to by using dwim-shell-command. Are there new magical command-line utilities out there I don't know about? In this instance, I got to learn about feh and dragon.

feh is a no-frills image viewer for console users while dragon is a simple drag-and-drop source/sink for X or Wayland. Both utilities are great uses of dwim-shell-command, enabling a seamless transition from Emacs to the outside world. These days I'm rarely on a linux box, so I was keen to ensure macOS had these cases covered.

Preview is a solid macOS equivalent to feh. Preview is already macOS's default image viewer. A simple open '<<f>>' would do the job, but if we'd like to make this command more portable, we can accomodate as follows:

(defun dwim-shell-commands-open-externally ()
  "Open file(s) externally."
  (interactive)
  (dwim-shell-command-on-marked-files
   "Open externally"
   (if (eq system-type 'darwin)
       "open '<<f>>'"
     "xdg-open '<<f>>'")
   :silent-success t
   :utils "open"))

Special mention goes to Bozhidar Batsov's crux which achieves similar functionality via crux-open-with. crux provides a bunch of other useful functions. Some of my favourites being crux-duplicate-current-line-or-region, crux-transpose-windows, crux-delete-file-and-buffer, and crux-rename-buffer-and-file, but I digress.

Moving on to a dragon equivalent on macOS, I thought I had it covered via reveal-in-osx-finder or reveal-in-folder. Turns out, neither of these reveal multiple dired-selected files within Finder. At first, I thought this could be easily achieved by passing additional flags/params to macOS's open command, but it doesn't seem to be the case. Having said that, this Stack Overflow post, has a solution in Objective-C, which is where things got a little more interesting. You see, back in July I added multi-language support to dwim-shell-command and while it highlighted language flexibility, I hadn't yet taken advantage of this feature myself. That is, until today.

The Objective-C snippet from the Stack Overflow post can be written as a Swift one-liner. Ok I lie. It's actually two lines, counting the import, but you can see that this multi-language Emacs transition/integration is pretty easy to add.

(defun dwim-shell-commands-macos-reveal-in-finder ()
  "Reveal selected files in macOS Finder."
  (interactive)
  (dwim-shell-command-on-marked-files
   "Reveal in Finder"
   "import AppKit
    NSWorkspace.shared.activateFileViewerSelecting([\"<<*>>\"].map{URL(fileURLWithPath:$0)})"
   :join-separator ", "
   :silent-success t
   :shell-pipe "swift -"))

<<*>> is the centrepiece of the snippet above. It gets instantiated with a list of files joined using the ", " separator.

NSWorkspace.shared.activateFileViewerSelecting(["/path/to/file1", "/path/to/file2"].map { URL(fileURLWithPath: $0) })

The proof of the pudding is of course in the eating, so ummm let's show it in action:

I should mention the webp animation above was also created using my trusty dwim-shell-commands-video-to-webp also backed by dwim-shell-command.

(defun dwim-shell-commands-video-to-webp ()
  "Convert all marked videos to webp(s)."
  (interactive)
  (dwim-shell-command-on-marked-files
   "Convert to webp"
   "ffmpeg -i '<<f>>' -vcodec libwebp -filter:v fps=fps=10 -compression_level 3 -lossless 1 -loop 0 -preset default -an -vsync 0 '<<fne>>'.webp"
   :utils "ffmpeg"))

dwim-shell-command is available on melpa. What other uses can you find for it?

UPDATE: Most DWIM shell commands I use are available as part of dwim-shell-commands.el. See dwim-shell-command's install command line utilities.