Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) has posted a really nice and useful video on something that I’ve been struggling with off and on for many years. The problem is I often want—usually several times a day—to pop up an Emacs buffer and run some command like org-capture. There’s no problem with that, of course, if I’m in Emacs but what if—as is often the case—I’m in some other app?
The basic strategy is to call emacsclient with a -e parameter specifying whatever Emacs command you want to run. The devil, as they say, is in the details. First of all, you have to arrange for an Emacs frame to hold the popup menu and then you have to arrange for it to be deleted when you’re done.
Prot provides a complete, easy to understand framework for all of this. He defines a macro that lets you specify an Emacs command for a popup. You need only specify an OS level key binding to call the function and identify a hook function that will call the function to delete the popup frame when the command is done—most other situations are handled by the code generated by the macro.
I’ve tried to solve this problem with everything from some Applescript to Alphapapas yequake. I’m currently using yequake and it works well for me but if I were starting out I’d definitely take a look at Prot’s code. It’s self contained, easily understandable and hackable, and can be adjusted to your particular use case. All you need is a way of binding an OS level key sequence to the appropriate command. If you need to execute Emacs commands from outside of Emacs, take a look at Prot’s code.