Using the commandline network utilities from Emacs

Unbeknownst to many, Emacs comes with a full suite of wrappers around the common GNU network utilities.

Most of the utilities are just simple wrappers around their command-line equivalents, but in full technicolor; but some – like the nslookup support – also adds full Emacs comint support.

Another useful feature is the built-in ffap support (it means find file at point) and it will try to determine if the point is – if used interactively with the net utils below – on a hostname or IP and default to that.

The net utils library were written with the GNU libraries in mind, so Windows users may find the support a bit lacking. But you can always download the Win32 ports.

Here’s a list of utilities Emacs supports; invoke with M-x . You may have to configure them to your liking, and you can do that by invoking M-x customize-group RET net-utils RET .