One of the nice things about Emacs is that when you find yourself performing the same set of steps repeatedly, it’s easy to capture those steps into an Emacs function or even a keyboard macro. If you’re like me, you’ll keep repeating those steps over and over until one day you realize that you really should automate them. Álvaro Ramírez has a video showing a nice example of this: cloning a git repository.
Ramírez begins his video by showing his old procedure. It’s really simple. Capture the URL to the clipboard, change into the target directory, paste the URL into a git clone command on the Eshell command line, execute it, and open the directory in Dired. If there’s a README, open it as the last step. It takes longer to write it down than it does to actually do it.
Still, they’re simple steps and easy to automate, which is what Ramírez did. His solution is nice. He just has to capture the URL and call his function. Everything else, including opening the README file is handled automatically. He has a bit of code to allow choosing the target directory if he doesn’t want to use the current directory. You can check out his code in his GitHub repository. It is, as I say, simple but it’s a nice example of removing friction from your workflow: just let Emacs handle the routine chores.
The video is only 6 minutes, 54 seconds long so you should have no problem finding time for it. It’s interesting and worth a few minutes of your time.