Fuse eaf variables with emacs variables

[antoine-levitt]

It is pretty annoying to not be able to set eaf variables directly with (setq), define keybindings, etc. This also doesn't benefit from emacs's great self-documentation features. Would it be possible to set up a bidirectional bridge between emacs and eaf variables? Or simply merge the two and have the python code look into emacs variables? On the lisp side there ishttps://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Watching-Variables.html to keep the variables in sync, if that helps.

[MatthewZMD]

Yes it is possible, however it would be very troublesome to tell EAF which Emacs variables to pass to the Python side, at least not in an elegant way.

For any documentation, please refer to the Wiki.

[antoine-levitt]

By documentation I meant eg describe-variable & co, which are very convenient. I was thinking of the variables in eaf-var-list, which basic users are more likely to interact with.

[MatthewZMD]

By documentation I meant eg describe-variable & co, which are very convenient. I was thinking of the variables in eaf-var-list, which basic users are more likely to interact with.

Yes, I do understand that. The reason it is currently in the eaf-var-list alist is the simplicity to pass every variable EAF cares about to the Python side - you just pass the entire list. It definitely has this drawback of lacking documentation.

[c1-g]

@MatthewZMD Have you considered using defcustom with a special :set function that will append them to eaf-var-list every time their value is set to define those variables in Elisp? And since these variables aren't technically in use for elisp we could rename them with eaf-py-.... prefix.

Also, since this really isn't an "issue" why not move this to Discussion?

[MatthewZMD]

I have not considered before, I will look into it when I have time.

[c1-g]

Hi, apparently I tried this,

(defcustom eaf-browser-enable-adblocker t
  "Whether to enable adblocker in EAF's browser app or not."
  :type 'boolean
  :set 'eaf-set)

and it just works.
So we can pretty much convert everything in the default eaf-var-list to this form, ideally in their respectively .el file.

[antoine-levitt]

Wouldn't that be even more confusing? Then if you do (setq eaf-browser-enable-adblocker nil) in your .emacs it wouldn't get passed to eaf.

[c1-g]

Since it's defcustom with setter function, you are supposed to set its value via
(customize-set-variable 'eaf-browser-enable-adblocker nil) or through the customize interface with
M-x customize-variable eaf-browser-enable-adblocker but yeah, this might cause an issue if users choose to use setq instead.

To handle setq, we can use variable watcher that you proposed,

(defun eaf-var-watch (sym newval op where)
  (eaf-set sym newval))

(add-variable-watcher 'eaf-browser-enable-adblocker #'eaf-var-watch)

Also, the defcustom I wrote earlier can actually be more complete by adding set-default,

(defcustom eaf-browser-enable-adblocker t
  "Whether to enable adblocker in EAF's browser app or not."
  :type 'boolean
  :set (lambda (sym val)
         (eaf-set sym val)
         (set-default sym val)))

This new one will show "Original Value" in conjunction with user's "Value" in the help interface.

[manateelazycat]

git pull newest version, eaf-setq has remove now.

We can use get_emacs_var("var-name") to fetch elisp var value at Python process.

[antoine-levitt]

Awesome, well done!