Welcome to the Homogeneous Unified Builder Interface or HUBI

This is a “batteries included” extension for Emacs for building software projects.

It presents transient interface when you can select the build tool, build directory and target before invoking the build. It tries to probe for build configuration so it can offer a narrowing list of targets. The current build and history is stored in a per-project .dir-locals-2.el file.

A lot of the probe and configuration is inspired by `counsel-compile` which I was also involved in developing. However the hope is the transient interface presents a more natural interface for tweaking things like build parameters than a pure narrowing interface.

If there is interest I have no problem adding this to ELPA or MELPA. However currently its origin as one persons pet quality of life tool makes it suitable for those with an adventurous spirit who are happy running the code out of a git tree.

HUBI depends on the `transient` package, which is built into modern Emacs but may need updating from ELPA/MELPA for older versions.

Checkout the repository and then you can use something like use-package to load it:

(use-package hubi
  :load-path "/path/to/hubi.git"
  :bind ("C-c c" . hubi))

HUBI currently supports the following build systems:

• **Make**: Standard Makefile discovery and target extraction.
• **Ninja**: Supports `build.ninja` and `Makefile.ninja`.
• **Meson**: Supports introspection of targets, tests, and benchmarks.
• **Cargo**: Supports Rust projects with workspace member discovery.

**Note on `jq` requirement**: For **Meson** and **Cargo** target discovery, the `jq` utility is required to be installed on your system.

`M-x hubi` or your preferred global keybinding and you should be presented with an interface like this:

Once you have selected the target and setup `C-c C-c` will invoke the build tool. `C-g` will quit the interface.

Although you can `M-x hubi-configure` it is more usually triggered from the main `hubi` interface. It follows a similar batteries included approach and provides an e`x`tract configuration option to populate the build configuration.

It currently understands the following configuration methods:

• **configure**: Various flavours of configure scripts
• **meson**: Sort of
• **cmake**: Even less well tested

This project is very much a scratch-your-personal itch style project so it may be useful to nobody. Nevertheless the project is licensed under GPLv3 and I’ll happily accept well formed pull requests. There is an AGENTS.md so the ability to use coding agents if you wish is implied. However this doesn’t absolve you the human of the responsibility of understanding the purpose and structure of the changes. Slop will be dropped unceremoniously.