Emacs M-x compile does not see any aliases set in .bashrc. If I use M-x shell then type the alias, it is fine. I tried sourcing .bashrc from /etc/profile, from ~/.profile, ~/bash_env, anything I can think of to no avail.
I am on Emacs 23 and Ubuntu 11. I start emacs using /usr/bin/emacs %F, from a desktop button.
You may like emac's bash-completion :
https://github.com/szermatt/emacs-bash-completion
You'll be able to use tab completion of your aliases in the compilation minibuffer and in shell-mode.
Enjoy !
(they speak about it here Bash autocompletion in Emacs shell-mode )
See Is there a way to get my emacs to recognize my bash aliases and custom functions when I run a shell command? for a fix which doesn't run all your .bashrc and doesn't create these error messages:
I think compilation commands are not interpreted through a shell: they are juste exec'ed by emacs (which means aliases, shell functions and other shell-specific things are not taken into account).
Try to wrap you compilation command into a shell-script which would source the correct environment.
You can do this either with a full-fledged shell-script in the form
or directly in emacs with a compilation command of the form
bash -c "source ~/.bashrc; my_command"
Keith Flower's answer works but can result in some slowdowns due to .bashrc being unnecessarily loaded in other places (presumably many many times, my computer is not exactly under-powered but emacs was almost unusable when trying to use autocomplete.el).
An alternative way is to locally modify
shell-command-switch
only for the functions where it is needed. This can be done using emacs' "advice" feature to create a wrapper around those functions. Here's an example that modifiescompile
:You need to write similar "advice" for each function that you want to use .bashrc (e.g. I also needed to define the same advice for
recompile
), just copy the above and replacecompile
in the above with another function name.Emacs inherits its environment from the parent process. How are you invoking Emacs - from the command line, or some other way?
What happens if you:
M-x compile RET C-a C-k bash -i -c your_alias RET
Invoking bash as an interactive shell (-i option) should read your .bashrc aliases.
Edit: I think both M-x shell-command and M-x compile execute commands in an inferior shell via call-process. Try the following in your .emacs (or just evaluate):
I notice that after evaluation of the above, .bashrc aliases are picked up for use by both M-x shell-command and M-x compile, i.e
M-x compile RET your_alias RET
should then work.
My environment: Emacs 24.1 (pretest rc1), OSX 10.7.3