Scanning QR/Bar Codes with Emacs

If you’re like me, every once in a while you need to scan a QR code—or even a bar code. Not often but every once in a while. There are all kinds of apps to do that, especially on our phones but, of course, the true and faithful Emacser wants to do it from within Emacs. Álvaro Ramírez to the rescue.

You can probably guess that this is another functionality he’s folded into his dwim-shell-command framework. The secret sauce is the zbarimg utility, which is available on all three of the major platforms. Ramírez recommends macOS users simply download it from Homebrew. There are binaries for many systems at the Zbar GitHub site.

This is, as I say, not something that you’re going to use every day so it make sense to give it an easy-to-remember name as Ramírez does. Of course, that’s a lot easier if you have his dwim-shell-command framework installed. Doing so not only gives you an easy-to-remember name but also arranges for it to work seamlessly with dired.

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