Re: Navigating Lisp data structures

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Matt <matt@excalamus.com> writes:

>  ---- 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?

Ugh, I know that mindset...

>  > 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.

And like I said, it's all under very active development, and I think
will end up looking much different (and much more feature-complete) in a
few months' time. Personally I'm making the minimal effective use of
project.el (and eglot), and waiting for the dust to clear to invest more
time in customization. But I do think they appreciate hearing feature
requests and use cases.