Álvaro Ramirez has announced another of his “ease my workflow” projects. Like many, or perhaps most, of the best projects, this one was conceived to scratch an author’s itch. This particular itch was finding a way of taking a quick look—or listen—to a media file from within Emacs.
It’s pretty easy to launch an external app to display or play a media file but Ramírez wanted to take his quick peek without leaving Emacs. He was inspired by image-mode and used it as a model for his solution. He liked being able to get out of the app quickly by simply pressing q and being able to navigate between media files in a directory easily with n and p. The actual playback is handled by one of mpv, vlc, ffplay, or mplayer according to the user’s configuration or by simply trying each of them in the order listed.
The application is brand new, has been tested only on macOS, and is not yet on Melpa but it is available from his from GitHub repository if it sounds like something you need right now. If it sound intriguing but not urgent you should probably wait a bit until he gets the wrinkles ironed out.
In any event, it’s one more way of staying in Emacs while still performing (non-editing) tasks on your computer.