Crafting a Configuration Site Generator in Emacs - Part 1

• Jeff Bowman will be speaking at the EmacsATX meetup Next Wednesday, Nov 2 about Crafted Emacs and his work on the crafted-mastering-emacs module! https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx/events/sstqrsydcpbdb/

• Next week is the yearly GitHub Game Off competition. It’s a month-long game jam which will give me a lot more time to hack on a small game with Mesche!

  Keep an eye on the Flux Harmonic YouTube and Twitch channels (FluxHarmonicLive on both), I’ll be streaming my work there occasionally.

• Support the channel! Buy Mastering Emacs with this link https://www.masteringemacs.org/r/systemcrafters

I’ve been saying for a long time that I want to simplify my configuration and eliminate the literate-style Org files that generate my entire configuration. However, I still want to produce a really nice site from my config files which documents them!

For the next few streams, I’d like to focus on building such a site generator with Emacs so that I can finally get my entire configuration up to date on https://config.daviwil.com.

Check out Hawk, a package that has inspired me to try to come up with my own approach for this:

https://migrev-dolseg.com/hawk/README.html

• Why drop Org-based config?

  I’m tired of having to tangle when syncing config between machines. I also want to treat my configuration as code because I intend to move more of my config to Guix Home!

• Why not just use a normal repo website like GitHub or SourceHut?

  It’s a good idea, but I’d like to have more control over how everything is presented.

• [X] Use the same syntax highlighting as I do in my configuration (or at least a specific Emacs theme)
• Linkable line numbers
• Possibly generate “permalink” folders for older commits
• Some basic method of formatting the contents of comments in code files, including links to other files
• Basic file tree pages and header/footer for navigation
• Possibly extract defined function names or comment heading to generate a table of contents
• It should also be good for generating literate documentation sites for code projects!

Here’s the rough idea:

• Use htmlize, htmlfontify or another similar package to generate HTML from code files
• Use dom.el to edit the HTML output to extract the body
• Use esxml to generate the outer layout of the pages
• Possibly use normal Org Export to export any .org files which can be used as entrypoints or commentary files

Help me come up with something!

• configweaver
• dotweaver
• dotvanity