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Spacemacs experimental features

Table of Contents

Spacemacs dumps using the portable dumper

The portable dumper is a feature that will be available with Emacs 27. This new dumper should theoretically work on all the three major OSes: GNU/Linux, macOS and Windows.

Setup

To test the portable dumper with Spacemacs, follow these steps:

emacs-plus users

In case you are using d12frosted/emacs-plus on macOS, you can skip manual Emacs installation instructions and just use --HEAD option passed to brew.

brew install emacs-plus --HEAD

Clone Emacs

Clone Emacs from https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/emacs.git:

git clone https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/emacs.git
cd emacs

Note: On windows make sure that autocrlf is disabled in git before cloning or else the autoconf.sh script will fail later on:

git config --global core.autocrlf false

Simple patch of Emacs source code

Note: This seems to not be needed anymore. For reference we still keep it in the guide.

We need to increase the number of remembered_data slots in src/pdumper.c, we double the number of slots by replacing 32 with 64:

static struct
{
  void *mem;
  int sz;
} remembered_data[64];

Compile Emacs from source

This step depends on your OS (please create a PR to add the instructions for your OS).

macOS

In the root directory of your freshly cloned Emacs repository in the master branch as the current branch:

./autogen.sh
./configure --with-ns --with-dbus --with-gnutls --with-imagemagick --with-rsvg  --with-mailutils --with-xml2 --with-modules
make

Ubuntu

Note: This is tested on Ubuntu 17.10.

In the root directory of your freshly cloned Emacs repository in the master branch as the current branch:

./autogen.sh
# Pick one. The first one will install Emacs locally and the second one will install it globally.
./configure --with-dbus --with-gnutls --with-imagemagick --with-rsvg  --with-mailutils --with-xml2 --with-modules --prefix="$HOME/.local"
./configure --with-dbus --with-gnutls --with-imagemagick --with-rsvg  --with-mailutils --with-xml2 --with-modules
make

If you have never compiled Emacs from source on your machine then you probably need to install the following packages:

sudo apt-get install build-essential automake texinfo libjpeg-dev libncurses5-dev
sudo apt-get install libtiff5-dev libgif-dev libpng-dev libxpm-dev libgtk-3-dev libgnutls28-dev

Windows

Note: This is tested on Windows 10

Install MSYS2 x86_64 from here.

Run msys2_shell.bat and in the msys2 prompt run:

pacman -S base-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain \
mingw-w64-x86_64-xpm-nox mingw-w64-x86_64-libtiff \
mingw-w64-x86_64-giflib mingw-w64-x86_64-jbigkit \
mingw-w64-x86_64-libpng mingw-w64-x86_64-libjpeg-turbo \
mingw-w64-x86_64-librsvg mingw-w64-x86_64-libxml2 \
mingw-w64-x86_64-gnutls

Quit the msys2 shell and run mingw64.exe in the msys64 install directory. In the mingw prompt navigate to the emacs source checkout (cd /c/ will get you to the root of the c drive) and run:

./autogen.sh
./configure --without-ns --without-dbus --with-gnutls --with-imagemagick --with-rsvg  --with-mailutils --with-xml2 --with-modules
make

Instructions from here.

Install Emacs

After the compiliation finished successfully, you may need to install Emacs.

make install       # if you configure Emacs to install locally
sudo make install  # if globally

Windows

In the mingw shell run:

make install prefix=/c/emacs
cp /mingw64/bin/{libwinpthread-*.dll,libXpm-noX*.dll,libdbus-*.dll} /c/emacs/bin
cp /mingw64/bin/{libgomp-*.dll,libgcc_s_seh-*.dll,libglib-*.dll} /c/emacs/bin
cp /mingw64/bin/{libintl-*.dll,libiconv-*.dll,libgobject-*.dll} /c/emacs/bin
cp /mingw64/bin/{libffi-*.dll,libgdk_pixbuf-*.dll,libgio-*.dll} /c/emacs/bin
cp /mingw64/bin/{libgmodule-*.dll,zlib*.dll,librsvg-*.dll} /c/emacs/bin
cp /mingw64/bin/{libcairo-*.dll,libcroco-*.dll,libpango-*.dll} /c/emacs/bin
cp /mingw64/bin/{libpangocairo-*.dll,libxml2-*.dll,libfontconfig-*.dll} /c/emacs/bin
cp /mingw64/bin/{libfreetype-*.dll,libpixman-*.dll,libpng*.dll} /c/emacs/bin
cp /mingw64/bin/{libpangoft*.dll,libpangowin32-*.dll,liblzma-*.dll} /c/emacs/bin
cp /mingw64/bin/{libexpat-*.dll,libharfbuzz-*.dll,libgnutls-*.dll} /c/emacs/bin
cp /mingw64/bin/{libgnutlsxx-*.dll,libtiff-*.dll,libtiffxx-*.dll} /c/emacs/bin
cp /mingw64/bin/{libjpeg-*.dll,libgif-*.dll,libbz2-*.dll,libjbig-*.dll} /c/emacs/bin
cp /mingw64/bin/{libgmp-*.dll,libhogweed-*.dll,libnettle-*.dll} /c/emacs/bin
cp /mingw64/bin/{libp11-kit-*.dll,libtasn1-*.dll} /c/emacs/bin

Update your dotfile

In the function dotspacemacs/init add the following variables if you don’t have them already and initialize them:

(defun dotspacemacs/init ()
 "Initialization:
  This function is called at the very beginning of Spacemacs startup,
  before layer configuration.
  It should only modify the values of Spacemacs settings."
    (setq-default

   ;; If non-nil then enable support for the portable dumper. You'll need
   ;; to compile Emacs 27 from source following the instructions in file
   ;; EXPERIMENTAL.org at to root of the git repository.
   ;; (default nil)
   dotspacemacs-enable-emacs-pdumper t

 ;; Name of executable file pointing to emacs 27+. This executable must be
 ;; in your PATH.
 ;; (default "emacs")
   dotspacemacs-emacs-pdumper-executable-file "emacs"

   ;; Name of the Spacemacs dump file. This is the file will be created by the
   ;; portable dumper in the cache directory under dumps sub-directory.
   ;; To load it when starting Emacs add the parameter `--dump-file'
   ;; when invoking Emacs 27 executable on the command line, for instance:
   ;;   ./emacs --dump-file=~/.emacs.d/.cache/dumps/spacemacs.pdmp
   ;; (default spacemacs.pdmp)
   dotspacemacs-emacs-dumper-dump-file "spacemacs.pdmp"))

A new user dotfile function has been added which is called before doing the dump. The function name is dotspacemacs/user-load. You can require additional libraries before the dump so they won’t need to be lazy loaded.

Add this to your dotfile if you don’t have it already.

(defun dotspacemacs/user-load ()
  "Library to load while dumping.
This function is called while dumping Spacemacs configuration. You can
`require' or `load' the libraries of your choice that will be included
in the dump."
  )

This is a good place to use the function spacemacs/dump-modes which all to easily load modes in a temporary buffer to trigger all the possible side effects.

For instance to load my-mode:

(spacemacs/dump-modes '(my-mode))

Friendly suggestions:

  • If you have a lot of personal configuration in user-init and user-config, you can try to move them into user-load as this can reduce the time to load those customized configurations.

Add pre-dump function to layers

It is also possible to execute some lisp for each used layer by defining a function named <layer>/pre-dump in the config.el file of the layer.

Example for the org layer:

;; Dumper

(defun org/pre-dump ()
  (spacemacs/dump-modes '(org-mode)))

Note: In order to not generate dump files that are too big we try to use this mechanism only when it makes a noticeable difference for all users.

Test

Restart Emacs. Each time Emacs starts, Spacemacs will check if the list of your layers has changed, if it has changed then Emacs will be automatically dumped for you in an asynchronous process. The buffer for the output of the process is named *spacemacs dumper*.

If you have no error during the dump you can test it out!

To actually start Spacemacs with the compiled Emacs 27 and the Spacemacs dump, on the command line in the src directory of the cloned Emacs source:

./emacs --dump-file=/Users/sylvain/.emacs.d/.cache/dumps/spacemacs.pdmp &

Report issues

If you want to report an issue regarding this new feature please use the label Portable Dumper.

All the related issues can be found with this link.

Usage

Once dotspacemacs-enable-emacs-pdumper is set to t and dotspacemacs-emacs-pdumper-executable-file is set to a valid file path to an Emacs 27 executable, Emacs will be redumped automatically each time the layer list changes or the --force-dump parameter is passed on the command line.

To use the created dump file, open a shell in the src directory of the cloned Emacs source and type:

./emacs --dump-file=/Users/sylvain/.emacs.d/.cache/dumps/spacemacs.pdmp &

spacemacs.pdmp corresponds to the value of the variable dotspacemacs-emacs-dumper-dump-file.

A forced dump is executed whenever the configuration is reloaded with SPC f e R. If a dump is already running then it is cancelled and a new one is started. Check the buffer *spacemacs-dumper* to see the progress of the dumping.

After you can generate a portable dumper of your Emacs and you can start that pdumper file successfully, you can alias the way you usually start Emacs to the command:

./emacs --dump-file=/Users/sylvain/.emacs.d/.cache/dumps/spacemacs.pdmp &