November 1, 2009 — jao

As part of a general migration from darcs to git as my default SCM system (a migration whose reasons include magit being so much better than darcsum), i’ve been tidying up a bit my emacs configuration files and factoring out a small set of libraries that people may find useful.

The new git repository, clonable from http://git.hacks-galore.org/jao/emacs.git and browsable online here, contains a subdirectory called lib with the code i’ve factored out so far:

emms contains add-ons for the Emacs multimedia system, including OSD notifications, lyrics retrieval and a play-random-album facility.

net is a handbag of networkish utilites: mailbox query and display, emacs-w3m sessions and a weather info fetcher.

themes is my own color theme engine, implemented on top of the custom-themes package included in Emacs 23. Defining new color themes is, i think, short and sweet.

skels contains a collection of skeletons and related utilities that i use to insert templates in new files.

sys is a set of system utilities, most of them from my times as a Mac aficionado and, therefore, probably bit-rotten. Except for jao-osd, which gives you (very rudimentary) access to aosd notifications within emacs.

org contains an assortment of extensions for org-mode.

tracker is actually a C program that i use to query the tracker daemon that indexes all my documents. The actual queries are performed and displayed in emacs by an Anything extension of mine that i haven’t yet extracted from my configuration as a separate library, and that can be found there.

bmk is a (web) bookmark manager that i don’t use anymore (all my bookmarks are kept in org files these days).

There’s also a directory called external with other emacs packages that i use unmodified.

As i said, the idea is that the libraries above should be usable independently of my specific configuration bits, which are contained in the custom folder. The files in that folder will give you additional hints on how to customize the libraries.

With very few exceptions, all these packages are anything but well-documented, but perhaps you’ll find some bits useful. A long delayed project of mine is to use this blog to go through all of them in a series of posts that we could call TEOS, The Emacs Operating System. They would be not only about how the individual libraries work together, but, most importantly, about how they integrate with each other and with other stock Emacs packages to provide an operating environment that, in my humble opinion, surpasses any other commonly used operating system in terms of productivity and extensibility. An Elisp Machine where you are in control and have all the fun.

I’ve been playing with the idea of joining PragProWriMo and make this part of a book writing project that would explore in detail TEOS, with intermediate Emacs users in mind. If i finally go for it, you may consider this post as the first in the series, but i haven’t made up my mind yet.

Be it as it may, i hope you’ll find some elisp snippets above worth stealing for your own Emacs Operation System.