@orbjet Yes, and yes!
You can run a simple shell, eshell (a shell that evaluates elisp), or a terminal emulator.
Even better, you can just run a shell command at-will from anywhere and the output will display in a new buffer.
OR, you can run that shell command and have the output dump into your current buffer, at point.
One step further - you can highlight a region and send that to your shell command via stdin, which can either output into a new buffer, or replace your current region.
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@orbjet e.g.
I have been working on a Javascript prototype that outputs results in a few different csv formats depending on a flag I pass in when I run the program. So I wrote a couple shell scripts (./run and ./debug) that call node and pass in the respective flags.
I created a fresh buffer and put it into csv-mode. From that buffer I can invoke either shell script, have that output dump into my csv-mode buffer, and watch my results magically format to columns and rows.
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@orbjet
Prior to that, I had a shell script which would run the program, dump the output to 'tmp.tsv', open that file with libreoffice calc, then remove the file when I close calc. I love my libreoffice, but for rapid iteration, seconds turn into minutes opening and closing libreoffice over and over again.
If there's a "better way":tm: then you can probably find it in Emacs.
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@ssokolow
no I've never heard of that! I would still use my workflow for what I described, but that sounds like it would be useful for when I am working in libreoffice in general.
@orbjet