Thirty straight days

It’s already been a month since I moved from package.el to straight.el, and if it wasn’t for the constant fiddling with my Emacs configuration, I would have hardly noticed the differences in package management. A proof of the solid work behind straight.el, sure, but also a demonstration of how painless package management can be for someone who bypasses the provided UI and relies on use-package snippets to install and setup their packages.

However, with straight.el a new approach to updates is needed. First of all, I compulsively track the state of the packages I have installed, and I tend to update all of them every morning. This is an operation that follows the pulling of the latest developments on the Emacs master branch.

On the one hand, this approach could lead to breaking changes and tears of sadness. On the other hand, I like to report bugs as soon as I discover them, and hopefully help the great developers out there who make my text editing a wonder.

Considering how vital to my computing Emacs is, this may sound like complete madness, I know. In my defence, I mostly rely on stable and long-term support software on my computer. Emacs is just the special kind of madness that drags me to it in spite of the risks. Furthermore, as I wrote last time,¹ straight.el makes it easier to revert to a previous unbroken version of a package, so I can find a functional environment without too much of a hassle.

In my package.el days, package updating was handled by Paradox. In a matter of a couple of key bindings, it took care of notifying me about new versions and installing the selected updates. straight.el is less fancy, though. It provides the necessary commands to install and update a package, as well as the big brother that will pull every package in, but all the UI it offers is the user’s completing-read framework—ivy-read in my case.

Well, like the first line of the README says, straight.el is a tool for the Emacs hacker, so let’s play with it. All I had to do to get a more interactive user experience when updating packages was devising a small wrapper around straight.el’s facilities.

(defun mu-straight-pull-or-prune (&optional prune)
  "Update all available packages via `straight'.
With PRUNE, prune the build cache and the build directory."
  (interactive "P")
  (if prune
      (when (y-or-n-p "Prune build cache and build directory?")
        (straight-prune-build-cache)
        (straight-prune-build-directory))
    (when (y-or-n-p "Update all available packages?")
      (straight-pull-all))))

(bind-key* "<f7>" #'mu-straight-pull-or-prune)

Pretty straightforward, isn’t it? (Pun intended.)