I keep promising myself that I’m not going to publish anymore posts about Álvaro Ramírez’s dwim-shell-command articles but he keeps finding compelling new applications for it. The latest is a problem I often have: combining several JPEG images into a single PDF. For me, this usually comes up when I want to combine several receipt images—a bill and credit card receipt, for example—into a single PDF for tax purposes. That comes up all the time in my workflow and Ramírez’s simple application makes it easy.
Ramírez’s post is a useful one if you aren’t aware of the dwim-shell-command framework because he lists all the applications that he’s made/discovered for the it. If, like me, you like to stay within Emacs but sometimes (or often) need to run some application from the command line, dwim-shell-command is just what you need. That’s especially true if the command has a complicated, hard to remember syntax. You encapsulate all the complexity in a simple Emacs function and invoke it from within Emacs. What could be better?