I attempted to Nixify my Emacs over winter break. I made some meaningful
progress, but not enough progress to use my Nixified Emacs setup. Since Emacs is
my primary editor and my window manager at work and at home, having a partially
baked setup is untenable at the moment.
Reverting these changes so that I can get on with my work, but checking them in
so that I can pick up where I left off one day.
The things that I dislike about this setup are:
1. `xref-find-definitions` takes me to `/nix/store`, which is a read-only
version of the source code, so I cannot edit it, which doesn't feel lispy.
2. I need to rebuild the derivation when I change something, which also doesn't
feel lispy.
There are ways to circumvent both of these drawbacks, but for now, I'm checking
this in only to later revert it.
Previously my ERC setup just supported Google's internal IRC. Now I have
Freenode for things like #nixos, #emacs.
This complicated my KBDs for cycling through IRC channels since certain channels
only exist on certain servers. To remedy this, I introduced a temporary solution
that looks up the server given a particular channel. This isn't ideal, but it
works for now.
While this commit isn't much (i.e. notmuch), it represents one brave step
forward in the quest for supporting email in Emacs -- something I'm estimating
to be somewhere between a 1.5x and 2x workflow booster.
TL;DR:
Problem: I ran into a bug where my computer wallpaper was changing every five
seconds whenever my init.el file was open and I was typing in it.
Short-term solution: Disable flycheck.
Long-term solution: Disable flycheck just for Elisp or just for init.el in
Elisp.
Post Mortem:
Warning: If you have flycheck-emacs-lisp-initialize-packages set to auto or
really anything other than nil, than the emacs-lisp flycheck-checker will spin
up a new Emacs instance, and evaluate all of the Elisp in init.el.
Why does this matter? Well, if like me, you have code anywhere in your
init.el (and any files downstream from init.el), that code will get evaluated
not just twice. But countless times... tens, hundreds, w/e. So... while you
might think you have code that is just running at startup this code will be
called incessantly.
As a dramatic, contrived example, if you had something like...
```elisp
(bank/send :amount 100 :to "wpcarro@gmail.com")
```
...anywhere in that your init.el would evaluate, you may end up sending
wpcarro@gmail.com millions of dollars. To make debugging this problem a bit more
complicated is that because this runs in a separate Emacs instance, you can't do
something like...
```elisp
(defvar already-evaluated? nil)
(unless already-evaluated? (bank/send :amount 100 :to "wpcarro@gmail.com"))
(setq already-evaluated? t)
```
...since the `already-evaluated?` variable will be local to the Emacs
instance. So if you needed a mechanism to ensure code like this runs only once,
you would need a way to share this semaphore across Emacs instances --
e.g. writing to and reading from disk.
Google-related files should eventually be moved out of GitHub hosting and onto
Google infrastructure (e.g. Git on Borg).
When I do this, I should run:
```fish
> git grep --ignore-case google (git rev-list --all)
```
To assess the reference I've introduced into this repository.
Other tools that should come in handy when I do this are:
- git filter-branch
- BFG repo-cleaner
Currently paying the price of months of non-diligent git usage.
Here's what has changed.
- Theming support in Gvcci and wpgtk
- Dropping support for i3
- Supporting EXWM
- Many Elisp modules
- Collapsed redundant directories in ./configs
