Motivation
While disabling Evil in holy-mode makes its implementation shorter and
sounds elegant on the paper, in practice it puts a big burden on the
configuration parts which need to know if Evil is enable or not. This is
a bad separation of concerns and the bunch of fixes that we were forced
to do in the past weeks shows this issue. Those fixes were about
removing the knowledge of the activation of Evil by implementing new
dispatching functions to be used by layers, this is cumbersome and makes
Spacemacs layer configuration more subtle which is not good. There was
additional bad consequences of the removal of Evil state like the
impossibility to use Evil lisp state or iedit states, or we would have
been forced to implement a temporary activation of Evil which is
awkward.
Instead I reintroduce Evil as the central piece of Spacemacs design thus
Evil is now re-enabled in holy-mode. It provides the abstraction we need
to isolate editing styles and be able to grow the Spacemacs
configuration coverage sanely. Layers don't need to check whether the
holy mode is active or not and they don't need to know if Evil is
available (it is always available). We also don't need to write
additional dispatching functions, this is the job of Evil, and I think
it provides everything for this. Ideally configuration layer should be
implemented with only Evil in mind and the holy-mode (and hybrid-mode)
should magically make it work for Emacs style users, for instance we can
freely use `evil-insert-state` anywhere in the code without any guard.
Evil is now even more part of Spacemacs, we can really say that
Spacemacs is Emacs+Evil which is now an indivisible pair. Spacemacs
needed this stable API to continue on the right track.
While these changes should be rather transparent to the user, I'm sorry
for this experimental period, I failed to see all the implications of
such a change, I was just excited about the possibility to make Evil
optional. The reality is that Spacemacs has to embrace it and keep its
strong position on being Emacs+Evil at the core.
Implementation
- insert, motion and normal states are forced to emacs state using an
advice on `evil-insert-state`, `evil-motion-state` and
`evil-normal-state` respectively. These functions can be used freely in
the layer configuration.
- A new general hook `spacemacs-editing-style-hook` allow to hook any
code that need to be configured based on the editing style. Functions
hooked to this hook takes the current style as parameter, this
basically generalize the hook used to setup hjkl navigation bindings.
- ESC has been removed from the emacs state map.
- Revert unneeded changes
- Revert "evil: enter insert-state only from normal-state"
commit bdd702dfbe.
- Revert "avoid being evil in deft with emacs editing style"
commit f3a16f49ed.
Additional changes
All editing style packages have been moved to a layer called
`spacemacs-editing-styles`
Notes
I did not have time to attack hybrid mode, I should be able to do it
later.
New function configuration-layer/insert-lazy-install-configuration
This function asks for a layer and then insert the lazy configuration
for all the packages owned by this layer.
- New macro `spacemacs|transient-state-format-hint`
Additional hints can be formatted outside of the transient state macro.
This is a better separation of concern from an API point of view
because those hint are coupled to with the usage of :dynamic-hint
keyword. The transient state macro only need to know the entry point
for such dynamic hints, effectively increasing the readability of
transient state definition.
To be able to decouple the formatting of additional hints, a new
private variable whose name is given by the function
`spacemacs//transient-state-props-var-name` has been introduced.
An alternative would have been the save the whole transient state macro
props but a variable allows the cherry-pick only the values we really
need.
- Remove commented code about old variable
`spacemacs-transient-state-title-face`
- Remove unused keyword :entry-binding since it is not used. Given
the number and diversity of transient states in Spacemacs currently it
is a safe guess to remove this keyword for now. We can reintroduce it
later if really needed.
It's not possible to get full backtraces in these instances when an
error is signaled, and I think we should generate full backtraces when
debug-on-error is enabled as a general rule.
I had to make this change at one place to track down the root of problem
2 in #5200.
Bug lurking in the code for quite some time, if both a package and
its dependencies were uninstalled then activation of the dependencies
could fail. This is resolved by explicitly asking package.el to install
the dependencies if required.
Add actions for both helm and ivy.
TODO:
- see TODO in function body
- replace SPC h d p (list all packages, use spacemacs describe when
it is a layer package, otherwise use vanilla describe).
This new keyword allows to add all the packages to the <layer>-packages
even when a package is not toggled on by a given layer variable.
This fixes an issue of the layer system where we had to choose between
discoverability (ie. the list of package in helm or ivy with SPC h SPC)
and installation of package (because any package listed in the variable
<layer>-packages were installed).
Fix bug: When the list of package names returned by
configuration-layer//get-uninstalled-packages contains a package that
isn't contained in configuration-layer--packages, then
configuration-layer//install-package throws "wrong-argument-type:
eieio-object-p nil" error at startup.
configuration-layer//install-packages catches it and prints it in the
home buffer.
