-*- mode: org -*-

About

Emacs-Guix (aka guix.el) provides various features and tools for GNU Guix package manager.

It allows you to manage your Guix profile(s) from Emacs: to install, upgrade and remove packages, to switch and remove profile generations, to display all available info about packages and to do many other things.

If you are Evil user, note that Evil Collection provide key bindings for Emacs-Guix.

This README provides only a basic overview on Emacs-Guix, for a full and detailed description, see the info manual that comes with it.

In short, Emacs-Guix provides the following features:

• Interface for:
  • profiles
  • profile generations (including system generations for Guix System)
  • packages
  • services
  • package licenses
  • package and service locations
  • /gnu/store items
• Magit-like popup interface for all Emacs-Guix and Guix shell commands (M-x guix).
• Modes to view logs of package builds (guix-build-log-mode and guix-build-log-minor-mode).
• Minor mode to “prettify” store file names (to replace hash parts with “…”).
• Shell completions for all guix commands and options (for M-x shell and M-x eshell).
• Minor mode with additional functionality for scheme-mode to work with Guix .scm files, particularly with package modules (guix-devel-mode).

On the following screenshot you can see one of the mentioned features, namely: “list” and “info” interface for Guix packages (this screenshot was made for an early version of Emacs-Guix, the interface has slightly changed since then).

(alect-light theme is used there).

Installation

Emacs-Guix can be installed using Guix, from MELPA, or it can be used from a git checkout. Note that it is not recommended to mix several installations (in particular, Guix and MELPA), as it may lead to incompatibilities in the source (.scm) and compiled (.go) Guile files (see issue 21).

Guix

Just use:

guix package -i emacs-guix

MELPA

If you added “melpa” or “melpa-stable” archives to package-archives as it is described on the MELPA Getting Started page, you can install “emacs-guix” using M-x package-install or M-x list-packages commands.

Git checkout

Also you can clone this git repository and use Emacs-Guix from this git checkout (see the info manual for details).

Finally, if you have the git checkout, you can install Guix package for the current commit of Emacs-Guix using guix.scm file:

guix package --install-from-file=guix.scm

IMPORTANT NOTE for non-Guix-System users

If you installed Guix using Binary Installation method, most likely your environment (in particular, GUILE_LOAD_PATH) does not know where Guile modules of Guix and its dependencies are placed (they are somewhere in the store). But these Guile modules are needed for Emacs-Guix, so…

… if (during using Emacs-Guix) you encounter errors about missing modules, undefined variables, other strange errors from Guile REPL, or if you see unexpectedly small amount of Guix packages, you may try the following workaround for this problem:

• Install guix and guile into your user profile:

  guix package -i guile guix
      

  This guarantees that all Guile modules required by Guix will be available for external programs (in particular, for Guile and Emacs-Guix).

• Make sure your system uses Guix environment, i.e., check that your ~/.bash_profile contains lines like these:

  source "$HOME/.guix-profile/etc/profile"
  source "$HOME/.config/guix/current/etc/profile"
      

  Note, that the “current” profile should be sourced the last. Thus the latest guix (fetched by guix pull) will have a priority.

If you still have a problem after the above steps, feel free to open an issue about it.

Usage

M-x guix is the entry point for the available features.

You can also call M-x guix-help to get a summary of all available commands. Here is an incomplete list of them:

• Show packages and their definitions:

  M-x guix-all-packages
  M-x guix-installed-user-packages
  M-x guix-installed-system-packages
  M-x guix-packages-by-name
  M-x guix-packages-by-license
  M-x guix-packages-by-location
  M-x guix-package-from-file
  M-x guix-search-by-name
  M-x guix-search-by-regexp
      

  M-x guix-package-locations
  M-x guix-find-package-definition
      

• Show profiles and profile generations:

  M-x guix-profiles
  M-x guix-generations
  M-x guix-system-generations
      

• Show services and their definitions:

  M-x guix-all-services
  M-x guix-services-by-name
  M-x guix-services-by-regexp
  M-x guix-services-by-location
      

  M-x guix-service-locations
  M-x guix-find-service-definition
      

• Show store items:

  M-x guix-store-live-items
  M-x guix-store-dead-items
  M-x guix-store-failures
  M-x guix-store-item-referrers
  M-x guix-store-item-references
  M-x guix-store-item-requisites
  M-x guix-store-item-derivers
      

• Show/browse package licenses:

  M-x guix-licenses
  M-x guix-browse-license-url
  M-x guix-find-license-definition
      

• Magit-like interface:

  M-x guix
      

• Miscellaneous commands:

  M-x guix-help
  M-x guix-about
  M-x guix-pull
  M-x guix-prettify-mode
  M-x guix-build-log-mode
  M-x guix-devel-mode