Context:

I’ve used Emacs off and on for many years at this point. Throughout that time there have been periods where I really leaned in to it and tried to use it for everything, and there have been periods where I only used it for org and/or magit, etc. I’ve learned lots of things about it and I’ve forgotten lots of things about it, but I’ve never been what I would call an “expert” or even a “power user”. So, when I feel like something isn’t working well in Emacs, I almost always default to the assumption that I’m doing something wrong or misunderstanding something, etc.

So, it very well may be that I’m wrong/crazy in my recent conclusion that use-package might not be the ideal abstraction for managing Emacs packages.

With that out of the way, I’ll say that when I first saw use-package, I thought it was amazing. But, in the years that I’ve been using use-package, I never feel like my init file is “right”. Now, I’m starting to think that maybe it’s use-package that’s wrong and not me (insert Simpsons principal Skinner meme).

I don’t know how best to articulate what I mean by use-package being a “wrong abstraction”, but I’ll try by listing some examples and thoughts.

Autoloads

First of all, I feel like the way autoloads are handled with use-package is too mistake-prone. Libraries/packages typically define their own autoloads, but the use-package default is to eagerly load the package. I understand that installing a library via package.el, etc will process the autoloads for us and that manually/locally installed packages get no such benefit.

But, if we’re using use-package to also manage installing the packages for us (:ensure t), then why shouldn’t it know about the autoloads already and automagically imply a :defer t by default?

So, by default, we have to remember to either add :defer t or we have to remember that setting our own hooks, bindings, or commands will create autoloads for us.

I know that you can configure use-package to behave as though :defer t is set by default, but that’s just broken for packages that don’t have any autoloads.

It feels like maybe use-package is doing too many things. Maybe it was actually more correct in the old days to separate the installation, configuration, and actual loading of packages, rather than trying to do all three in one API.

Configuration that depends on multiple packages is ugly/inconsistent

Many packages are fairly standalone, so you can just do,

(use-package foo
    :defer t
    :config
    (setq foo-variable t))

and it’s clean and beautiful. But, sometimes we have configuration that is across multiple packages. A real-world example for me is magit and project.el. Magit actually provides project.el integration, wherein it adds magit commands to the project-switch-commands and the project-prefix-map. That’s great, but it will only run if/when the magit package is loaded.

So, my first guess at using use-package with magit was this,

(use-package magit
    :ensure t
    :defer t
    :config
    (setq magit-display-buffer-function #'magit-display-buffer-same-window-except-diff-v1))

which seems reasonable since I know that magit defines its own autoloads. However, I was confused when I’d be using Emacs and the project.el switch choices showed a magit option sometimes.

I eventually realized what was going on and realized that the solution was to immediately load magit,

(use-package magit
    :ensure t
    :config
    (setq magit-display-buffer-function #'magit-display-buffer-same-window-except-diff-v1))

but that kind of sucks because there’s no reason to load magit before I actually want to use it for anything. So, what we can do instead is to implement the project.el integration ourselves. It’s really just two commands:

(define-key project-prefix-map "m" #'magit-project-status)
(add-to-list 'project-switch-commands '(magit-project-status "Magit") t)

But, the question is: Where do we put these, and when should they be evaluated? I think that just referring to a function symbol doesn’t trigger autoloading, so I believe these configurations should happen after project.el is loaded, and that it doesn’t matter if magit is loaded or not yet.

Since, project.el is built-in to Emacs, it’s probably most reasonable to do that config in the magit use-package form, but what if project.el were another third-party package that had its own use-package form? Would we add the config in the project use-package form, or in the magit use-package form? Or, we could do something clever/hacky,

(use-package emacs
    :after project
    :requires magit
    :config
    (define-key project-prefix-map "m" #'magit-project-status)
    (add-to-list 'project-switch-commands '(magit-project-status "Magit") t))

But, if we do this a lot, then it feels like our init.el is getting just as disorganized as it was before use-package.

Conclusion

This is too rambly already. I think the point is that I’m becoming less convinced that installing/updating packages, loading them, and configuring them at the same time is the right way to think about it.

Obviously, if you know what you’re doing, you can use use-package to great success. But, I think my contention is that I’ve been familiar with Emacs for a long time, I’m a professional software developer, and I still make mistakes when editing my init file. Either I’m a little dim or the tooling here is hard to use correctly.

Am I the only one?

  • arthurno1BEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    if you have to understand (exactly) what is happening under the hood of an abstraction in order to use it correctly, then it’s not a good abstraction.

    Nobody says you have to understand it exactly, but you have to have an understanding of what is going on. You also have to have an understanding of the abstraction itself, of what are you using. Have you even read the use-package documentation? I don’t recall ever that use-package was meant to hide away the Emacs itself, but to help you write more structured setup. If you don’t like it don’t use it, it is not harder than that. I don’t use it myself. But your problem is neither Emacs nor use-package. I personally can’t care less if you use or not, but you are now blaming the missunderstanding on external factor. Lots of people are using use-package and find it useful. Perhaps you should reflect over if it is the software or the user :-). I don’t mean to be impolite or arrogant, but sometimes things feel difficult when we are not ready for them. Nobody promised that use-package should be trivial, albeit I personally don’t think it is very difficult tbh.

    You have two packages: X and Y. You want to do something with Y if X is loaded, but sometimes you want to just “jump” into Y without loading X, and than wonder why your X based setup will not load. In Emacs your vanilla option is to always load X whey you load Y, or cook your own thing. In your particular example, your option is to load project.el whenever you load Magit, it is not harder than so. Just require package.el in your Magit configuration.

    requires me to more-or-less just macro-expand all of my declarations to see what they are actually doing.

    Welcome to Lisp :-). You can compare that to C++ where you more or less have to look at assembly output if you care about efficiency and what your compiler does behind your back. I think you should actually be thankful you can do that. Try to do that with Python, JS or you name it.

    The fact that so many people struggle with it gives credence to this as well.

    I would rather care how many people do not struggle when looking at the big picture of how many people actually use use-package.

    Frankly, Emacs is complex and complicated.

    Sure, but so is any piece of software that does non-trivial tasks. If you find Emacs too complex and complicated, to the limit that it causes too much frustration and time loss, don’t use it, nobody is holding your hands.

    It has lots of legacy baggage and idiosyncrasies

    Sure, I agree. I personally use to say that Emacs is a hack over a hack. And I am really surprised how well it runs and does what it does, how hacked together the source is. But is to expect of 50 year old software. It is developed by many people with different backgrounds and different goals, mostly by hackers who just wanted to bend Emacs to do their own thing. It is a hackable editor made for hackers.

    I would expect people to get their with-eval-after-loads wrong or their keybinding syntaxes wrong

    I wouldn’t. Mostly because those two particular things are incredibly simple to get correct.

    use-package seems to hurt as much as it helps

    I think it is individual. What you did wrong in your example is that you haven’t required project.el in your Magit configuration. Do it and your problems will be gone. Simple. Nothing wrong with use-package.

    I can also tell that you can just use with-eval-after-load and mode hooks to achieve the same lazy setup if you prefer not to use use-package. I don’t think it is that hard; I have done it myself and I was not even an experienced Emacs user or Emacs Lisp programmer at that time.

    I can understand your frustration; I have been there myself, and my best tip is: start reading the documentation and built-in help. It is a best first step towards understanding Emacs or user-package one can take.

    • meedstromBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I have to correct you: their example is more about making sure Magit will be loaded so it configures project-switch-commands, before they call project-switch-project. And don’t “solve” it by just loading Magit on init. I suppose naively it could be solved with

       (autoload #'project-switch-project "magit")

      and I’m not sure what’s the equivalent use-package expression. You have to be careful not to lose the usual guarantees of use-package wrt. graceful degradation (we don’t want an error “unknown file magit” – which is the whole point of use-package, otherwise you may as well just write the above form).