Re: Emacs integration for 'guix shell'

[Philip Kaludercic]

"Thompson, David" <dthompson2@worcester.edu> writes:

> Hello all,
>
> I recently wrote a little blog post titled "Guix for development" [0]
> and in it I mentioned using a tool called direnv and emacs-direnv as a
> way to integrate 'guix shell' with Emacs. This integration has vastly
> improved my Emacs experience. I can open a shell buffer and the
> environment variables are automatically configured the way I want. I
> can run M-x compile and simply enter 'make' as the command instead of
> 'guix shell -D -f guix.scm -- make'.
>
> It's very cool that it works, and I should have done this years ago,
> but direnv is an unnecessary middleman for me because I don't use it
> for any other purpose.  It would be *even cooler* if Emacs could call
> 'guix shell --search-paths' directly, parse the result, and update the
> buffer environment.  Furthemore, it could integrate with project.el
> (thus requiring Emacs 28) so that per-project search paths "just
> work." The emacs-guix-shell [1] project attempts to do this.
>
> I'm not an experienced elisp programmer so I'm sure there's stuff to
> fix, and there are no customizable variables yet, but the essentials
> seem to work OK for me.  If you'd like to try it out, eval
> guix-shell.el and then M-x guix-shell-global-mode to enable it
> everywhere, or M-x guix-shell-mode to enable it just for the current
> buffer.
>
> Whether through direnv or guix-shell.el, integrating Emacs with 'guix
> shell' has been a game changer for my development workflow and I
> highly recommend it!

I haven't used direnv, but how does it compare to buffer-env?  I worked
on the Guix integration a few months ago and it has been working really
well for me.

> That's all for now,
>
> - Dave
>
> [0] https://dthompson.us/guix-for-development.html
> [1] https://git.dthompson.us/emacs-guix-shell.git/