Emacs integration for 'guix shell'

[Thompson, David]

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!

That's all for now,

- Dave

[0] https://dthompson.us/guix-for-development.html
[1] https://git.dthompson.us/emacs-guix-shell.git/