I have quite a busy time lately due to some deadlines, so today there’s only a short tip. I used to use M-! (shell-command) and ! in Dired (dired-do-shell-command a lot of the time (e.g., for previewing pdfs with evince), but it was tiresome to type evince & etc. each time. “There must be a better way”, I thought, and I was right. The better way is M-& (async-shell-command and & in Dired (dired-do-async-shell-command), respectively. (For pdfs – and LaTeX – I also put this in my init.el:
(setq dired-guess-shell-alist-user
'(("\\.pdf\\'" "evince")
("\\.tex\\'" "pdflatex")))
so that I can ! or & on a LaTeX or pdf file and just hit RET.)
That’s it for today, folks. Next week I’ll write more.