Re: Emacs integration for 'guix shell'

[Thompson, David]

Hi Philip,

On Sat, Oct 1, 2022 at 4:22 AM Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net> wrote:
>
> "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.

Oh, I didn't realize buffer-env had Guix integration. My little
project may be completely unnecessary, then. When I looked at it I
noticed that it still used .envrc files and wasn't fully compatible
with direnv so it didn't seem as good compared to something that just
directly invoked 'guix shell'.  Will buffer-env automatically invoke
'guix shell' without the presence of a .envrc file?  And does it
integrate with project.el?  I guess I can answer these myself by
trying it out.  If it does both of these things then I can happily
switch over to it.

Thanks for the pointer!

- Dave