gitweb.el -- Quickly visit a repo's forge from Emacs

Posted on 2019-10-21 10:41 +0100 in Emacs • 2 min read

gh.fish, which I wrote about yesterday, actually sprang from something I initially wrote for Emacs. I'm often spending my time switching between Emacs and the command line (which is fast and easy -- I normally work on macOS and have Emacs and iTerm2 running full screen, and I can switch between them without ever taking my hands off the keyboard), so it makes sense to have some handy commands repeated in both places.

So, originally, I'd written gitweb.el to open the current repo's "forge" in the web browser.

As with the fish version, how it works is quite simple. I use shell-command-to-string to call git and find the origin URL for the current repo, and then manipulate it a bit to turn it into a normal browser-friendly URL. Finally, if I get something workable, I use browser-url to have the resulting page open in the browsing environment of choice.

I have the command bound to a key combination that's similar to the ones I use with magit and forge, so in terms of muscle-memory it's easy for me to remember what to press when I quickly want to skip over from a magit view to the repo forge itself.

Similar to what I wrote a couple of days back, I think this again illustrates how handy Emacs is as a work environment. While it's absolutely true that there are other development environments out there that offer similar extensibility, Emacs is the one I'm comfortable with, and it has a long history of offering this.