Re: Navigating Lisp data structures

[Matt <matt@excalamus.com>]

 ---- On Sun, 04 Dec 2022 21:05:13 -0500  Eric Abrahamsen  wrote --- 
 > Wow, it looks like you're recreating complete project management
 > facilities from scratch! That's impressive, and also a bit terrifying.

Yeah, pretty much :) 

I've been refactoring a package I wrote and have been using for a few years now, peut-gerer (https://codeberg.org/excalamus/peut-gerer).   I found I'd written a handful of utilities sharing the loose theme of "project workflow management" and so packaged them up.  I recall at the time project.el being largely undocumented (it seems to have an info entry now) and was, at least to me, incoherent.  I'm glad to see it's been developed since then.  I also found myself reading the projectile documentation trying to figure out how to do what I wanted instead of actually coding.  Why spend 30 minutes reading when you could spend 30 hours programming, right?

 > Your adventurous spirit is to be commended, but you might _also_ look
 > into making use of more of Emacs' built-in facilities for this stuff.
 > Emacs has projects, and projects have `project-compile', which calls
 > `compile', and a bunch of the config above looks like it could be worked
 > into existing facilities.

I agree, it looks like what I'm doing could be fit to project.el.  I appreciate you mentioning it because I was able to steal some ideas >:)  Unfortunately, I still find the documentation for project.el lacking.  Specifically, there appears to be nothing about how to actually define a project.  All the commands assume one exists.  I'm on 28.2, though, so maybe the documentation and code is different on HEAD.  

 > There are/have been some truly monster discussion threads recently in
 > emacs.devel and the bug tracker about how to expand and make use of
 > projects, so that's very much in the process of evolution. I haven't
 > seen anyone suggest incorporating window layout into projects, and I'll
 > bet that some people would find that interesting.
 > 
 > Just a suggestion!
 
Thanks for the suggestion and for welcoming my opinion!