Re: patches for etags and shell-command

[John Williams <jrw@pobox.com>]

Richard M. Stallman wrote:
>     I have two patches today; the first one changes shell-command so that the 
>     default interactive argument is the current buffer's filename.
> 
> Is the idea that you type M-n to bring the current buffer's filename
> into the minibuffer, and then you type the rest of the command around
> it?  Access to that file name would be useful, but at the same time,
> this interface would be rather inconvenient to use.
> 
>     This patch corrects a bug in etags that causes completion to only
>     consider the tags in a single TAGS buffer.  With the match tag
>     completion will consider tags from all the active TAGS buffers.
> 
> That seems like a clean extension.  I will forward it to the etags
> maintainer.
> 

It takes a little getting used to, but it's quite natural to use once 
you get used to M-! M-n meaning "run a shell command on the current file."

Most of the commands you'd use in conjunction with the current file name 
accept the file name as their last argument, so running a command 
usually involves this key sequence:

   M-! M-n <my-command> SPC RET

(If I'd though of it before now I would have added a space at the 
beginning of the default argument since it's probably needed anyway 99% 
of the time.)

Not being able to insert the current filename in the minibuffer seemed 
like a glaring omission when I started using Emacs after years of using 
Vim, so I would really like to see some way of achieving that 
functionality became part of Emacs.

Before I came up with the idea to use M-n, I also considered expanding 
"%" the way Vim does, but I think that's too likely to cause surprises 
to users unfamiliar with the feature.  I also tried adding a special key 
binding to insert the current file name, but I don't think the added 
flexibility is worth the cost of having to remember yet another key 
combination.

--jw