plumpmath / pretty-sha-path.el

Prettify Guix/Nix store paths in Emacs

About

This Emacs package provides minor-mode for prettifying Guix / Nix store paths by replacing SHA-sequences with ellipsis, i.e.:

/gnu/store/72f54nfp6g1hz873w8z3gfcah0h4nl9p-foo-0.1  →  /gnu/store/…-foo-0.1
/nix/store/nh4n4yzb1bx7nss2rg342dz44g14m06x-bar-0.2  →  /nix/store/…-bar-0.2

Screenshot:

Installation

Automatic

This package is avalable on MELPA.

Manual

As usual for the manual installation, add a directory with pretty-sha-path.el to the load-path and add necessary autoloads:

(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/pretty-sha-path")
(autoload 'pretty-sha-path-mode "pretty-sha-path" nil t)
(autoload 'global-pretty-sha-path-mode "pretty-sha-path" nil t)

Guix

pretty-sha-path is also distributed with GNU Guix (since Guix 0.8), so if you have Guix installed, this package is already installed. The only difference is that it is called guix-prettify there.

Usage

• Enable/disable prettifying for the current buffer:

  M-x pretty-sha-path-mode
      

• Enable/disable prettifying globally:

  M-x global-pretty-sha-path-mode
      

Using programmatically in your emacs init file:

• Enable only for some modes:

  (add-hook 'shell-mode-hook 'pretty-sha-path-mode)
  (add-hook 'dired-mode-hook 'pretty-sha-path-mode)
      

• Or enable globally on emacs start:

  (global-pretty-sha-path-mode)
      

Why?

So why does this package exist if there is a more general solution – pretty-symbols? pretty-symbols has 2 disadvantages (IMHO):

• It is not possible to enable it globally.
• Decomposition does not occur after disabling the mode, i.e. the paths would stay “prettified”.

So if you are not going to disable it and use it globally, then pretty-symbols-mode will probably be a better call.

Note: There is also prettify-symbols-mode which is a part of Emacs 24.4. It is great for prettifying symbols (like “lambda”) but it does not support regexps.

For other analogous packages, see EmacsWiki: Pretty Symbol.