Alexey Koval has a nice post on Emacs as a devops editor. It’s from a little over a year old but it’s still worth taking a look at. I’m not involved with devops but I still learned a few useful things from the post and accompanying videos.
For example, Koval shows how to debug shell scripts from Emacs using bashdb. That can be really handy when your script is more than a few lines long. Of course, you can also run the script from inside Emacs and test things as you go along. In that respect, it’s another example of interactive programming, a method that I find especially useful.
He also has a nice section on using tramp to work with remote files. I tend to do stupid things like opening an SSH session to list the files to find the name of the file I want but as Koval shows, you can just open the remote directory you’re interested in to get a dired listing from which you can pick whatever file you need. Once you’ve got a remote session going, you can even start a remote shell that reuses the same SSH connection that tramp is using.
There are 7 short videos in the post that illustrate the points Koval’s making. My only complaint about them is that he doesn’t have a key display utility so it’s sometimes hard to follow what he’s doing. Nonetheless, the videos are really useful and I learned some new tricks from them.
The post is definitely worth looking at even if you’re not involved with devops.