Problem ¶

I use spacemacs, which is centered around Hydra
Over the years I built muscle memory that’s very useful and fast inside Emacs BUT it’s worthless in other applications
the next application that I spend most of my time in is the Terminal
I would like to make this muscle memory useful in the terminal as much as possible

Finding ¶

Bash has a bind command which utilizes readline library key bindings
So I can bind a program to space key just like spacemacs
Unfortunately, this means pressing space at any time it’ll trigger the program/function
- To solve this I need it to run only if the line is empty.
- Pressing space when the terminal is empty doesn’t have any use case for me
- Then I can bind the space key to shell function that trigger the program only if the line is empty
- Stackoverflow helped with this

if I want the command to change the shell’s current working directory it will not work
- because a process that executes system runs the command in a subshell that exists after the command exists
- so cd will work inside the subshell and the user’s original shell will have the same original working directory
The solution is to
- Not to execute the command inside the program
- Print the command and eval it from the shell function
- Print the UI to stderr instead of stdout to separate the UI output from the command that needs to pass down to the shell to eval it.

I wanted an excuse to practice C again and this program seems to be simple enough
I used GnuMake to compile and install the program
I’m using Bash so anyone with Zsh probably will need to change the shell script

It was very useful to develop this program for me to get back to C
binding ls to space in Hydra means that I can press space twice in any directory and I’ll get the current directory contents.