A long time I presented a simple hack that allowed you to quickly navigate to your shell’s user config file (e.g. .bashrc or .zshrc). While the solution gets the job done it was pretty basic and limited - most notably it’d ignore the fact that you typically have several shell config files that are often built on top of each other - e.g. /etc/profile, ~/.bash_profile and ~/.bashrc. Fortunately the original hack evolved rather nicely and today lives in the crux library under the name crux-find-shell-init-file.1

Provided you’ve installed crux all you need to do is run that command (e.g. with M-x crux-find-shell-init-file) and you’ll get something like this as the result:

instant_shell_config.png

Pretty neat, right? Even in its updated state the command is not complex at all:

(defun crux-find-shell-init-file ()
  "Edit the shell init file in another window."
  (interactive)
  (let* ((shell (file-name-nondirectory (getenv "SHELL")))
         (shell-init-file (cond
                           ((string= "zsh" shell) crux-shell-zsh-init-files)
                           ((string= "bash" shell) crux-shell-bash-init-files)
                           ((string= "tcsh" shell) crux-shell-tcsh-init-files)
                           ((string= "fish" shell) crux-shell-fish-init-files)
                           ((string-prefix-p "ksh" shell) crux-shell-ksh-init-files)
                           (t (error "Unknown shell"))))
         (candidates (cl-remove-if-not 'file-exists-p (mapcar 'substitute-in-file-name shell-init-file))))
    (if (> (length candidates) 1)
        (find-file-other-window (completing-read "Choose shell init file: " candidates))
      (find-file-other-window (car candidates)))))

I guess one thing that we can improve down the road is adding an option to display the shell config in the same window, but that’s a small thing. The variables like crux-shell-bash-init-files are simply lists of all potential files that we should look for, that’s why I’ve opted to omit them from the code listing.

I stand by my original suggestion to bind this useful command to C-c S:

(global-set-key (kbd "C-c S") #'crux-find-shell-init-file)

That’s all I have for you today! Meta-x forever!

  1. Did you notice the subtle difference in the names of the original and the updated article? ↩