Re: Emacs in multiple profiles

[Pierre Neidhardt]

Hi George,

thanks for you input. 

> I think the default emacs behavior reflects tje concept of emacs and
> emacs-guix as "uber-all": E.g., Installing them in the default profile
> ~/.guix-profile/ allows a power user to do anything.
>
> But, if you want to work in separate, independent project profiles each
> with their own manifest, profile, and custom configs, it isn't obvious
> what to do.

I believe it is straightforward, as for other programs with non-default
multiple profiles: if the etc/profile is sourced, behave as if it were
the default.

> E.g., Where is the .emacs file?

I'm not sure that's related, .emacs is in the user's home.

> Which profile do you get
> when you run a shell?

Which shell?

> How do you run a version of emacs or an emacs
> package other than the one installed in the default ~/.guix-profile/?

The `emacs' you run is the last one in your PATH.  This is defined by
the load-order of the profiles, as for any program.  This is not Emacs-specific.

> Which .emacs.d/ gets used?

As above, this is the user's file, this is related to the Guix profile.

>> When I source the etc/profile where I've installed my Emacs packages,
>> I'd expect the appropriate environment variables to be set so that
>> `guix-emacs-autoload-packages' knows where to load the packages from.
>>
>> I believe the solution to be simple:
>>
>> 1. Make Emacs packages set XDG_DATA_DIRS in etc/profile
>> 2. guix-emacs.el: Remove guix-user-profile
>> 3. guix-emacs.el: Set profiles to all the paths in XDG_DATA_DIRS in the
>> guix-emacs-autoload-packages function.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>
> FWIW, I can report on how I have happily used separate, independent
> guix/emacs "project" configs for over a year.

I believe we are talking about slightly different things.  Every user is
free to write their custom scripts and Emacs config to suit their needs.

The problem I'm trying to address here is that of the default behaviour
of non-default profiles (actually: profiles in general).  With
zero-config, zero-script.  I believe Emacs should behave like the rest,
i.e. load the packages of all active profiles.

Cheers!

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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