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Emacs Ninja - Design Is Hard

 4 years ago
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Design Is Hard

20/10/2017

This isn’t about the pixel pushing kind of design, but the engineering one. Given a problematic matter, what choices do you make to create a tool that enables its user to effectively interact another object? More importantly, how do you deal with choices that are hard to rectify afterwards? While this is going to be a rant, the subject is one of my more popular Emacs packages, Shackle. I thought the 1.0.0 release of it with a new debugging facility to make troubleshooting easier is just the right moment to ponder a bit about those choices I made and why I regret some of them.

You may wonder “Wait, what is wrong with Shackle? It has over a hundred stars of GitHub, a few thousand downloads on MELPA, dozens of people using it in their init files and a handful of people recommending it to others.”. While all of this is true, it’s not all roses. I occasionally get issues from users that don’t understand it at all and I can’t really blame them. There is a fundamental mismatch going on here because all this package does is hijacking the display-buffer-alist variable to invent a similar, but not quite as powerful mechanism on top of it. It’s an inherently leaky abstraction which makes for less than ideal debugging: If it ever breaks down, you’ll have to understand both the abstraction and the underlying code it’s built upon.

This project started off with me not understanding how to use this variable at all. In hindsight, this should have been the first warning signal: If you can’t fully understand the problem, don’t expect to solve it in a satisfactory manner. There are a few glaring problems with display-buffer-alist:

  • The docstring for it is hard to parse. If a newbie asks how to customize the display of a certain buffer and is directed to that variable, I couldn’t blame them for just giving up on this altogether.
  • It isn’t clear how to display a buffer in a certain way. I’ve found only one example in the elisp manual so far and it’s more about display-buffer than display-buffer-alist.
  • Conditions may be buffer names and functions, but not major modes. This is rather annoying as it means you’ll have to write a function to check the major mode yourself. While this is far from fool-proof (the code setting up the buffer may enable the desired major mode only after displaying it), it works in many cases.
  • If your customization of display-buffer-alist contains a call to a function that errors out, the display of that buffer will fail. This is particularly annoying if you have a catch-all rule there that prevents the source debugger window from appearing, something I mostly ran into while developing Shackle. While you can use M-: (setq display-buffer-alist nil), it’s relatively annoying to do so.
  • The default behavior is rather inscrutable and mostly, but not only determined by display-buffer-fallback-action. Worse, some packages rely on the default behavior just to fail with customizations to display-buffer-alist.

Now, does Shackle do better? Well, it does in some ways while being worse in others:

  • Conditions are interpreted as buffer names (if a string) or modes (if a symbol) or a list of either. While this is convenient, the original design had the issue of making it impossible to match by regex or use a custom function, so I added a :regex modifier to the action (which is just wrong because it changes all of them to match by regex) and interpret a list starting with :custom as a function which isn’t nice either. Judging by GitHub’s search there’s about three users of this functionality, with the most prolific one being doom.
  • Shackle tries being easier to understand with regards to actions by abolishing the alist approach and instead going for a flat plist. There is no hierarchy whatsoever which turned out to be a mistake, people didn’t understand that there were keywords with mutually-exclusive behavior, keywords that modified other keywords and keywords that work universally. I’ve had feature requests where I was asked to allow to combine keywords more flexibly, to explain how the whole thing works and most surprisingly, to provide a grammar of the implemented language. The latter found its way into the README and is more confusing than helpful IMO. If you want to understand the behavior, you’re best off with heading to the source. I consider this to be the ultimate proof of failing at its design.
  • It’s way harder to shoot yourself in the foot, in case you do you can always bail out with M-x shackle-mode and revert to vanilla Emacs behavior.
  • The mere act of enabling Shackle will subtly change the default behavior of displaying buffers. The reason for this is shackle--display-buffer-popup-window which tries to do something sensible, but will never behave like the original.
  • I’ve added a feature that doesn’t display a window differently, but rather modifies the window parameter. Admittedly it makes things more convenient because you’d otherwise need a second package to achieve the same effect, but it’s the main reason for display of buffers intended to not be selected to have weird side effects.
  • Debugging Shackle not working as expected is rather tricky. In the best case you’ll need to look at the source code of a package to check whether it’s using display-buffer or a function using it internally (like pop-to-buffer, pop-to-buffer-same-window, switch-to-buffer-other-window, etc.). In the worst case you’ll need to debug the part of the package displaying such windows or Shackle itself while it tries matching conditions and applying actions. I’ve added a tracing mode to make the former easier, but the inherent leaky abstraction remains.
  • While Shackle stayed mostly the same, Emacs gained new capabilities for display-buffer-alist. There isn’t nearly as much reason for using Shackle now, other than laziness. Other people reached the same conclusion that it’s worth investing some of your time in customizing display-buffer-alist.

The bottom line is that I’m not happy with Shackle’s design, but am wise enough to keep it as is and not do any more invasive changes. My happiness (or the lack of) isn’t worth risking the happiness of its users.



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