Editing Google Docs in Emacs

vivekhaldar.tumblr.com

66 points·gandalfgeek··7 comments

I'm not an emacs user, but this is pretty awesome. Anyone know if something similar exists for Vim?

Since vim integrates with the world and doesn't try to rebuild it in lisp, you can use the google command line client. An example from the docs (from the command line):

google docs edit --title "Shopping list" --editor vim

For Emacs, you can also do essentially the same thing with emacsclient. It opens a new buffer for editing in an existing Emacs session, so config and extensions are already loaded, you can copy content to/from other buffers, etc.

For anyone else wanting to do this on Ubuntu and getting an error about missing gdata.service, you will need to get the following packages:

googlecl_0.9.11-1_all.deb python-gdata_2.0.7-1_i386.deb

Install with: sudo dpkg -i googlecl_0.9.11-1_all.deb sudo dpkg -i python-gdata_2.0.7-1_i386.deb

And then also the python package gdata-2.0.13 install using sudo python setup.py install

Why does it require emacspeak? Can you use it without having your computer talk to you?

It requires g-client (GoogleClient) which is a sub-package of emacspeak.

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GoogleClient

Because the author of g-client (on which this is built) is T.V. Raman, a blind programmer. g-client is built upon Emacspeak, which is also authored by Raman. Yes, you can use it without the speech part. I imagine it relies on Emacspeak for some of the underlying framework.

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