config.org 7.0 KB

#+TITLE:Doomed Chicken

Preface

This is another attempt at making a decent Emacs configuration for the chicken I am. Having multiple files with a poor consistence or a directed goal always bit me in the back relatively quickly. So this time, I'll try to write something documenting my process to warn my future me about my current configuration mishaps.

The first steps in the look&feel

The colors

Lately, I have been partial towards Gruvbox, for multiple reasons, the first being that I was tired of all those blue themes. It's a warm colorscheme, it has a good contrast in most of the situations and I built my whole's old laptop UI based on Gruvbox. Good thing Doom Emacs has a preset for this specific colorscheme.

(setq doom-theme 'doom-gruvbox)

The fonts

The other basic configuration I usually do first too is setting a font. PragmataPro has been my newest typographic friend as it's really good for what it's made for: displaying text in a flexible yet consistent way. I really like the small touches like the ligatures

(let ((base-size 12))
  (setq doom-font (font-spec
                   :family "PragmataPro Mono Liga"
                   :size base-size)
        doom-variable-pitch-font (font-spec
                                  :family "PragmataPro Liga"
                                  :size base-size)
        doom-unicode-font (font-spec
                           :family "PragmataPro Liga"
                           :size base-size)
        doom-big-font (font-spec
                       :family "PragmataPro Liga"
                       :size (* base-size 2))))

PragmataPro's ligatures have been toggled within init.el though the pretty-code layer and it's optional specialization for this font. No more setting is to be done for this font.

Tweaks

Window borders

Nothing really fancy yet, I'm content with how Doom looks right now. In the future I might add something to change the windows' border colors. Window dividers (located in the window-divider group) are inheriting from the vertical-border face, so editing the later allows me to quickly change the border color if needed.

;; (set-face-attribute 'vertical-border nil :foreground "red")

Functions

Blog helpers

Org mode is awesome, that's a fact. I tried to look into making org my blog framework/builder but I couldn't. I switched to Hugo and reconverted my blog files into Markdown.

Draft jump list

Hugo has a few utilities, notably listing draft posts. I wrote a while ago a function to list drafts and feed them to helm. Doom Emacs seems to use ivy as file browser, so I have to adapt it to feed Ivy. I currently have a version that works pretty well on the blog's project. I have an error risen by Hugo that blocks Ivy from doing its completion when Hugo can't find the blog config.

Here's how it works. First we have a function that calls Hugo's draft listing based on the project's directory.

(defun chicken/list-hugo-drafts ()
  "Fetches the current drafts in a hugo project when available.
Assumes the current project is a Hugo one."
  (let
      ((root (projectile-project-root)))
    (counsel--split-string
     (counsel--call
      (list "hugo" "-s" root "list" "drafts")))))

Then I have an interactive function I can call that will process the list given by list-hugo-drafts and either opens the file or does nothing if the user cancels the search. Something to note here is how I have to rebuild the whole path based on the project's root. If the user was in another folder, which can happen for instance when opening another file, the action callback would have tried to open the selected file relatively to the current folder instead of the project folder. There is also a check to detect first the presence of a config file before attmepting to invoke hugo to give a sensible message.

;;;###autoload
(defun chicken/hugo-goto-draft ()
  "Opens an ivy-powered search helper to quickly jump on a draft
if the current project is the root of a Hugo-powered site."
  (interactive)
  (if (file-exists-p! "config.toml" (projectile-project-root))
      (ivy-read "Open a draft: " (chicken/list-hugo-drafts)
                :require-match t
                :history 'chicken/hugo-goto-history
                :action (lambda (file)
                          (with-ivy-window
                            (when file
                              (let*
                                  ((root (projectile-project-root))
                                   (full-file (concat root file)))
                                (find-file full-file)))))
                :unwind #'counsel-delete-process
                :caller 'chicken/hugo-goto-draft)
    (message "The current project doesn't have a config.toml in the root directory.")))

Search Everything with Everything

Everything is a very useful tool for Windows that indexes all the available in the system and provides a insanely fast search popup to directly find the file you want based on either globbing or regexes. On Windows, I just can't live without it. It also provides a command line utility designed to search on a console but also works very well as part of a scripting toolbox.

Inspired by a friend's desire to use it on his own Emacs setup, I wrote a small function based on Ivy to let me jump on any file with the command line version. First, the function that will feed ivy-read. It assumes es.exe is in your PATH.

(defun chicken/counsel-es-function (str)
  (or
   (ivy-more-chars)
   (progn
     (counsel--async-command
      (format "es %s" str))
     '("" "working..."))))

Then the search function. It doesn't do any guards on the presence or not of the es.exe executable in your PATH environment variable. The function is largely inspired by Ivy's own examples.

;;;###autoload
(defun chicken/search-everything ()
  "Call the \"es\" shell command.
INITIAL-INPUT can be given as the initial minibuffer input."
  (interactive)
  (ivy-read "Everything: " #'chicken/counsel-es-function
            :dynamic-collection t
            :require-match t
            :history 'chicken/search-everything-history
            :action (lambda (file)
                      (with-ivy-window
                        (when file
                          (find-file file))))
            :unwind #'counsel-delete-process
            :caller 'chicken/search-everything ))

Finally, let's set up a shortcut to directly search a file globally with that tool. I'm going to map it on [LEADER]-s-E, as I hope it won't be used in the near future by Doom Emacs' default configuration. The mapping makes sure that you have the executable available before enabling the mapping.

(map! (:when
        (and
         (executable-find "es")
         (featurep! :completion ivy)))
      :leader
      :desc "Everything" "sE" #'chicken/search-everything)