So you have npm bin -g that yields the bin directory where npm installs stuff. Is there a way to use npm to run stuff from that directory? An obvious option would be $(npm bin -g)/installednodeprogram but I am calling this from an external program (emacs) and would like to avoid bringing up a shell. Also I could get the path from npm bin -g and then concatenate the program name and do all sorts of checks but I hope there is a cleaner way I couldn't find like npm run-binary installednodeprogram.
If you've installed a program globally, you can run its command from the shell just like any other. In fact, that's what the npm command itself is.
For example:
npm install -g browserify
browserify file.js # browserify command is now available