Okay, okay: I’m weak and can’t stick to even the promises I make to myself. This is yet another post on Álvaro Ramírez’s dwim-shell-command framework. Yesterday, it was combining JPEGs into a single PDF file; today it’s killing processes from within Emacs.
I really like Ramírez’s solution but not for the reason you might think. It’s nice to be able to kill a process from within Emacs but I have almost no need to that. The reason is that I spend virtually all my time in Emacs so if any process needs to be killed, it’s usually going to be Emacs. The second reason is that when I do need to kill a process, I simply click on the Apple icon and choose Force Quit from the menu. That does require the mouse but it’s quick and easy and, most importantly, works even when Emacs is the application needing killing. Still, Ramírez’s, and your, workflow is likely different from mine so it’s easy to see how this can be a good solution.
Why do I like it, then? It’s that it’s a beautiful piece of code and shows how Elisp is well up to the task of retrieving and acting on system information that we usually think of as requiring low level system programming to get at. It’s all Lisp; no cheating by dropping into C or shelling out to a system utility. It’s very nice and well worth a few minutes of study.