[mjmein]

Org-mode and babel sound like good ideas, but in practice I've found it very finicky to use.

My main problem with it is that, unlike with executing commands in the shell, with org you don't get any progress, and emacs seems to hang while running the command.

For example, running apt update tends to freeze emacs without any progress reporting for a few minutes.

I'm hoping that I'm doing something wrong and that someone can chime in with a suggestion, because I really like org-mode, and I really like the idea of doing devops using it.

[Spivak]

It's not 'freezing' Emacs so to speak, source block execution is synchronous.

Check out: https://github.com/astahlman/ob-async if you want to change that.

[mjmein]

Thanks. I've tried that in the past. The problem is still that it doesn't give any feedback on progress.

I still struggle to see how people actually use this with devops on a day to day basis.

I think that some type of integration with tmux would work well - have a running tmux session, and then just queue commands from emacs to that session, instead of running directly through emacs.

[_pfxa]

If you want to see progress, it should be easy to add a process filter somewhere (I bet there already is a hook for that, but not that hard to do even if there isn't one) and make it display sth. on a secondary buffer. That's the thing with Emacs: if you don't have it, it's very easy to add it.