emacs-pager
Use Emacs to display pager-like output from shells run inside the same Emacs host.
This repo contains components that work together to get this to work. First, you are using Emacs and you enjoy spawning shell processes within Emacs to do work within an Emacs environment.
- emacs-pager.el -- Emacs lisp file that defines a simple command and buffer mode to show the pager output.
- emacs-pager.sh -- Simple Bash shell script that saves content to a temporary file for Emacs to use to show in a new buffer.
- emacs-pager-env.sh -- Example of how to setup your shell environment to have Emacs be
your pager for commands like
gitorman.
Emacs Installation and Configuration
You will need to put emacs-pager.el in a location where your Emacs process can find it, and then have Emacs
load it at startup. You will also need to start Emacs server so that it can respond to emacsclient requests:
(require 'emacs-pager)
(require 'server)
(unless server-running-p
(server-start))
Additionally, you probably want to make sure that any shell subprocess you create via M-x shell has the right
environment settings, so something like this might desired in your Emacs startup file:
(setq explicit-bash-args '("--login" "-i"))
(setq explicit-zsh-args '("--login" "-i"))
Shell Installation and Configuration
You will need to put the emacs-pager.sh someplace in your PATH and make it executable. For instance, if you
have the directory $HOME/bin in your PATH environment, you could do the following:
% cp emacs-pager.sh ~/bin/emacs-pager
% chmod a+x ~/bin/emacs-pager
Finally, you need to update your shell's interactive configuration file to use emacs-pager for paging duties
when running inside a shell in Emacs. The file emacs-pager-env.sh contains a way to do so that has worked for
me.