send custom commands to shell

Question

I have just joined the Emacs church. I would like to know if the following can be done.

Say I have a project folder, I would like to run some custom commands that tie to some keyboard shorcuts for that folder only.

For example, say I am in /home/Documents/project, I would open this directory in Emacs and I would press, say C-x-F5 for example, and Emacs would send some custom commands that I declare and run in the shell.

Is it possible to do this? The only thing I manage to mess around is the compile command, M-x compile. But how to tell Emacs to only execute that while in /home/Documents/project?

Below is my attempt at modifying the compile command with adhook to compile C++ file.

(add-hook 'c++-mode-hook
          (lambda ()
            (set (make-local-variable 'compile-command)
                 (concat "g++ " buffer-file-name "&& ./a.out"))))

Please let me know.

Answer 1

The O.P. may wish to set up some directory local variables as described in the Emacs manual:

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Directory-Local-Variables.html

As set forth in the manual (supra), "...Emacs uses these to create buffer-local bindings for those variables in buffers visiting any file in that directory." The following link to one of the answers in a semi-related thread describes how to bind functions to buffer-local variables:

How to bind keys to a function which can be defined per-mode?

If a *shell* buffer is already open, a user can call (comint-send-string "*shell*" "COMMAND\n") where the first argument is the name of the running process; or, a user can omit the \n and then follow comint-send-string with comint-send-input.

[A user may choose to have a default function bound to a global variable (such as 'ignore or a message that says "Go fish...") and do something specific if the variable is locally bound. E.g., testing with the function local-variable-p ....]