Emacs Tip: A Key to open the Current Folder in Windows

10 Jun

Posted by Arun bhai as General, Technical, emacs

If the over-descriptive title was not enough, this is another one of my tips to use my favorite editor - Emacs. Some of you really liked my earlier post on Emacs tips on Windows, so here is one more tip to improve your productivity.

Most of the time while editing a document, we need to quickly browse the folder of that file. Add the following lines to your .emacs files and so that by just pressing function key F12 you can immediately view its corresponding folder:

A nice extra is that the opened explorer will have the current file automatically selected. Press F12 once in a while, it quickly becomes addictive

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4 Responses

Lennart

July 18th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
1

You can find some more of this kind in Emacs+EmacsW32.
numericalexample.com

July 23rd, 2008 at 5:48 pm
2

This is extremely useful for me. Unfortunately I can’t get it working. The error message is: “convert-standard-filename: Wrong type argument: stringp, nil” (in the Messages buffer).

By the way I rather would like explorer to open the current directory (belonging to the current buffer) than the current file.

If I evaluate the following in the Scratch buffer: (setq fname-temp (convert-standard-filename “f:/numericalexamplecom/.emacs”)) then the value of fname-temp becomes “f:/numericalexamplecom/.emacs” so convert-standard-filename does not convert forward slashes into backward slashes either.
Arun bhai

July 23rd, 2008 at 8:02 pm
3

@numericalexample.com:

I am not able to reproduce this problem. Can you have a look at your w32-shell-dos-semantics ? Maybe it will solve your issue.
numericalexample.com

July 25th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
4

This function returned ‘nil’. So I added the following to my emacs file: (defun w32-shell-dos-semantics() t) Now it does exactly what I want when I execute the explorer command from an emacs buffer containing a file.

The error I got before seems to occur only when I execute the explorer command from a Dired buffer or from a cygwin shell.

Another way of quickly browsing a folder when editing an emacs buffer is just pressing “ctrl-x ctrl-f return”. But this does not help us when we want to open a file that can not be opened in emacs such as a pdf.