robario / dropbox.el

Dropbox for Emacs

dropbox.el, A Dropbox Client for Emacs

dropbox.el provides lets your read and write Dropbox files from Emacs.

Setting Up

After downloading dropbox.el, you'll need to authorize it to connect to your Dropbox. Run customize-group, with group dropbox; you should see a field for your Dropbox "access token".

To create this token, navigate to the Dropbox developers console and click through the questions to create a new Dropbox app. (Choose the "Dropbox API" option and give it access to the full Dropbox.)

Click "Create App", and you'll be taken to the new app's details page. Find the text "Generate Access Token" and click the "Generate" button below it. Copy and paste the long random string you get in response into the "access token" field in Emacs. Save the buffer, and you're ready to use Dropbox.

Using dropbox.el

Once you have saved your access token, you can use dropbox.el by simply attempting to open a file in any folder beginning with /db:.

For example, if you open the path /db:, you'll get a Dired window in the root of your Dropbox folder. You can use many of the usual Dired commands from here; you can also open files to edit them.

Known Bugs

• dropbox.el seems to be incompatible with Helm.

Unsupported

dropbox.el supports much of the functionality you'd expect from an Emacs Dropbox client. A few otherwise-reasonable features aren't yet supported.

• Some file operations are still in progress (like file and directory copy and rename)
• None of the shell-command or process-file variants are supported.
• Not all optional arguments are implemented for many functions.
• Symbolic and hard links aren't handled, though Dropbox must somehow handle them internally.
• Race conditions abound. Don't use dropbox.el simultaneously on multiple machines.
• The setup for this package is incredibly confusing.