Clock in and get-shit-done

I had setup a couple of hooks about an year ago that turn off all notifications while I’m clocking in. But, I find myself switching to the browser and jumping to twitter, out of habit. I’ve tried get-shit-done in the past to help myself break this habit. But enabling get-shit-done manually is step that quickly became a non-habit.

So, I hooked up get-shit-done into an org-clock-in-hook. The snippet below is what I added into a function that is added to this hook.

(with-temp-buffer
  (cd "/sudo::/")
  (shell-command "HOME=/home/punchagan get-shit-done work"))

get-shit-done needs to be run as root, since it does things like modifying /etc/hosts and restarting networking. Just calling get-shit-done as a shell command fails with the error sudo: no tty present and no askpass program specified. I found a couple of ways to fix this. The snippet above piggy-backs on tramp to allow for a way to enter the password for sudo to use. This also means that I don’t need to enter the password, as long as the tramp connection is alive.

For someone worried about having such an easy way of running something as root, using something like gnome-ssh-askpass as the askpass program might work better.

(shell-command "SUDO_ASKPASS=\"/usr/lib/openssh/gnome-ssh-askpass\" get-shit-done work")
Feel free to tweet to me or send me an email with your comments.
Want a weekly digest of these blog posts?