My Emacs plugin got accepted in Melpa!
Me and Emacs
I have been an Emacs user for 4-5 years now. Although admittedly I have also been a (Neo)Vim user for a longer duration than I have used Emacs. I still switch back-and-forth between the two depending on the task at hand and my mood. I have also tried 100s of other text-editors but none seem to stick with me as these two. I can never get enough of the extensibility of Emacs and obviously Magit holds me hostage, like every other Emacs user xD. And each child has heard the legend's of Vim's efficiency.
Each day I used Emacs, I felt like the power to create was at my fingertips but I could never find something to create that I found worthwhile; something that I myself would use everyday in my development cycle. I tried learning common lisp and elisp, and the syntax felt weird because anything I wrote was a nightmare to read.
Elisp
Needless to say, I am not a lisp developer by any stretch of the imagination. I use web & related technologies at work and all those follow procedural or imperative paradigm and are pretty straightforward to read. And since I was not acclimated to reading lisps, Elisp felt intimidating and a language for someone more intelligent than me. For instance, Protesilaos' work felt like something I could never achieve even after his brilliant videos that helped me in usage of Emacs. I had given up the idea of anything relating to writing lisps; but then came along a ray of sunshine in a rainstorm.
Tsoding writes an Emacs Plugin
Probably doesn't come as a surprise but I absolutely adore Tsoding. It's astonishing the level of programming he showcases while bringing fun and rigour to "recreational" programming. He actually might be the reason I am still programming. All glazing aside, he posted this video:
This video was so fun to watch while he whooshes his magic wand making elisp look not just readable, but something fun and something I desired to write programs in. It was almost enlightening to watch him go through a language that he doesn't program in and writing code that makes sense to me, sitting probably 1000 miles away.
AoC in Elisp
All inspired from watching tsoding's video and ready to write some elisp, I turned to Advent of Code. That seemed like a challenge I could take. And surprisingly, I could solve some AoC problems without help from the clanker! Feels so rewarding to accomplish something without help from generative AI :)
You can find the code here: Advent of Code
It felt quite nice to be able to build on the momentum and actually put it into practice. Here is an excerpt from one of the solutions:
As you might be able to tell, we are implementing wraparound arithmetic here. Whether you take a step backwards or forwards, you always stay between 0 and 99. This one liner elegantly models the circular knob being talked about in the AoC problem.
This was my first glimpse into the potential of elegance that lisp holds while not being apologetic for making a mess.
Inspiration for my plugin
The idea was stolen directly from Sylvan Franklin. I won't go into the details of what I think about him and his content because most of his content is irony layered upon irony lmao.
But this is the video where he implements a convenience script for himself in neovim that does the same thing as my plugin:
I watched this and realised I literally face the same problem at my day job as well as when I'm programming recreationally. Everytime I have to take certain actions through GitHub's web UI, I have to navigate away from my code editor to my browser, create a new browser tab, manually enter the URL of the project at hand, pray that the browser's auto-complete completes the correct URL, and then proceed with whatever I wanted to accomplish; be it merging pull requests and what not.
This had to be either repeated or I would have to give real-estate to the project's GitHub in my browser at all times to prevent repeating this action. This always bugged me but I never thought of solving this, since it is a relatively minor inconvenience; until I saw the video and realised how much unnecessary mental overload would I have been relieved of if I had solved this earlier.
Hence turepo came into being.
Getting turepo into Melpa
This was my first ever interaction with such a huge and well-maintained open-source
project. It was quite intimidating to even think that my silly little plugin could
be of use to someone and could reach a platform like Melpa. But I said to myself,
why not let the Melpa maintainers reject it rather than me rejecting it myself.
So I got to reading the project contribution guidelines so as to not make a fool
of myself xD. The process was quite straightforward to follow. Essentially, I
just had to make sure my elisp code compiles cleanly, lint the code with emacs'
in-built checkdoc and then with purcell's package-lint.
This exposed quite a few ways I could make the plugin better and suited for
a wider audience. I read tsoding's old plugin that he had submitted for reference.
And just pressed the submit button and let the anxiousness begin.
Riscy's feedback came in just a few days after. I honestly thought no one would ever have a look at the plugin. But here it was, a well-revered developer in the emacs community, actually went through my naive code and gave precise and extremely helpful pointers as to how I could rise above the attitude of making a plugin for my own convenience sake and start to approach it as how it could be useful to most amount of people that use emacs.
The feedback discussions were my first foray into the world of actual open-source contributions. I realised an open-source org like melpa cares more about the users and the people in general than many enterprise level organisations developing critical applications. Melpa has standards and it tries its best to adhere to them unlike so many organisations and startups who try to introduce standard practices, but introduce unnecessary meetings and bureaucracy instead. I guess the difference lies in the mindset; open-source cares about people, enterprises' livelihoods lie in money-making.
Keeping that aside, I learned a lot from developing and publishing such a simple but practical plugin. The sense of accomplishment was more than delivering entire full-stack applications. Even after publishing the plugin, I never thought anyone would even have a look at it. But to my surprise, it has received 12 whole downloads (at the time of writing). That is 12 people in the world who found my plugin and tried it! I have even received 1 pull request from an engineer in Taiwan who introduced a small but very useful patch to my code.
Again, it is quite unbelievable that some person from Taiwan literally used my code to make his life better and made the efforts to make the plugin better for everyone else!
Turns out that thing I was looking for, to create something I'd use everyday, ended up being useful to a few people probably a 1000 miles away too.