shell-command-x.el

Extensions for Emacs' shell commands.

Overview

shell-command-x-mode provides an assortment of extensions for the interactive Emacs shell commands shell-command and async-shell-command. Its primary features are:

• The names of process buffers can be customized on a per-command basis; for example, the buffer name for the command ls -la can be automatically set to *shell:ls*, *shell:ls -la*, or any other number of desired values.

• When a command completes, its output buffer can emulate special-mode; this is useful for quickly dismissing (with quit-window) or quickly re-running the command (with revert-buffer).

• When a command completes, the point can be moved to the beginning of the output buffer if the command wasn't interactive; this is useful for paging through the output of commands like grep --help.

Installation

This package is available on MELPA. Simply activate shell-command-x-mode in your configuration after installing.

(shell-command-x-mode 1)

Configuration

shell-command-x is highly configurable. Refer to its customization group for a full list of options and detailed documentation.

M-x customize-group RET shell-command-x RET.

Additionally, there are some other built-in shell-related configuration options that pair well shell-command-x-mode. In particular, by setting async-shell-command-display-buffer to nil and configuring display-buffer-alist, you can configure Emacs to be very particular about only displaying command buffers that have useful output.

;; If a shell command never outputs anything, don't show it.
(customize-set-variable 'async-shell-command-display-buffer nil)

(customize-set-variable
 'display-buffer-alist
 `(;; Never show mpv and xdg-open buffers...
   ("\\*shell:\\(mpv\\|xdg-open\\)\\*.*"
    (display-buffer-no-window))
   ;; ...but show all other command outputs in a dedicated side window.
   ("\\*shell:.*?\\*.*"
    (display-buffer-in-side-window)
    (side . right)
    (window-width . 80)
    (dedicated . t))
   ;; etc...
   ))

Similar Packages

• shelldon.el. Like shell-command-x, shelldon gives buffers more meaningful names. shelldon also provides a numbered history of each command run out of the box. However, shell-command-x has a more configurable naming scheme and provides more features. The two packages are theoretically compatible with one another.
• dwim-shell-command.el. This package primarily adds extra templated arguments to shell commands, in particular, when used with dired. It also provides its own take on whether or not to display shell command buffers, using a combination of heuristics and explicit user input. While the extra templating is a fantastic feature, its focusing behavior conflicts with an ordinary display-buffer-alist-based workflow. The two packages are theoretically compatible with one another.
• async-shell.el. In addition to the special-mode like features, provides some additional features via a transient-based interface. It operates separately from the built-in shell-command, but all in all, it's very similar to shell-command-x.el.