Question

I have a program that can send text to any other program for further analysis (eg sed, grep, etc). I would like it to send the data to Emacs and do analysis there. How would I do that? EmacsClient takes a filename by default, this is a data string not a file and I really don’t want to create and delete files just to send data to Emacs.

EmacsClient has an “eval” command-line option that let’s you execute lisp code instead of open files. Is there a simple lisp function that will open a new buffer with the given text?

Edit: I’m looking for something like:

emacsclientw.exe -eval (open-new-buffer 'hello world')

And a new buffer would automatically appear with the word “hello world”. I’m not sure how the name of the buffer would be set. Hopefully something auto-numbered.

Answer 1

This does what you ask for:

emacsclient -e '(open-buffer-with "some\nstuff\nhere")'

(defun open-buffer-with (txt)
  "create a new buffer, insert txt"
  (pop-to-buffer (get-buffer-create (generate-new-buffer-name "something")))
  (insert txt))

Obviously you can customize open-buffer-with to do what you want.

There’s a similar question you might want to look at: How do I get basic App<->Emacs integration?.