Emacs Sub-processes

Something that’s quite useful in Emacs is the ability to start a running process in the background. This can be done with the start-process function.

Examples

We can set the directory to run in by wrapping the call to start-process in a let expression that sets the default-directory variable.

(let ((default-directory "~/Projects/blog"))
  (start-process "hugo" "hugo[blog]" "hugo" "server" "--buildDrafts" "--buildFuture"))

There’s a lot of mentions of hugo here let’s break this down a bit

• The first gives a name to the process, this will show up in places like the process-menu

• The second names the buffer that will be used to display the output from the process

• The third is the hugo command itself, followed by any additional arguments to pass to it.