Protesilaos Stavrou

Emacs: cursory version 1.1.0

Cursory provides a thin wrapper around built-in variables that affect the style of the Emacs cursor on graphical terminals. The intent is to allow the user to define preset configurations such as “block with slow blinking” or “bar with fast blinking” and set them on demand. The use-case for such presets is to adapt to evolving interface requirements and concomitant levels of expected comfort, such as in the difference between writing and reading.

Below are the release notes.

Version 1.1.0 on 2024-09-14

Cursory is in a stable state. This version includes quality-of-life refinements.

The cursory-mode simplifies how the state is stored

Cursory has functions to store and restore its state. In previous versions, we would document how to use those by adding them to the relevant hooks. This approach still works, though we now provide an easier way to achieve the same result: just enable the cursory-mode.

Technically, all this does is to set the hooks if enabled, and unsets them if disabled.

The “restore” phase is the same as before. For example:

;; Set last preset, if available, or fall back to the `bar' preset
;; from the `cursory-presets'.
(cursory-set-preset (or (cursory-restore-latest-preset) 'bar))

Use the cursory-set-preset-hook

The cursory-set-preset-hook is a normal hook (where functions are invoked without any arguments), which is called after the command cursory-set-preset. Here are some ideas on how to use it:

;; Imagine you have a preset where you want minimal cursor styles.
;; You call this `focus' and want when you switch to it to change the
;; cursor color.
(defun my-cursory-change-color ()
"Change to a subtle color when the `focus' Cursory preset is selected."
  (if (eq cursory-last-selected-preset 'focus)
      (set-face-background 'cursor "#999999")
    (face-spec-recalc 'cursor nil)))

;; Here we just show how to disable a given mode.  Of course, we can
;; have something more sophisticated, which stores the last value and
;; restores it if the condition we are testing for here is not met.
;; Keeping it simple for now.
(defun my-cursory-change-color-disable-line-numbers ()
  "Disable line numbers if the Cursory preset is `presentation' or `focus'."
  (when (memq cursory-last-selected-preset '(presentation focus))
    (display-line-numbers-mode -1)))

I am happy to include more examples here, if users have any questions.

Miscellaneous

  • Fixed a dependency for older Emacs versions. The subr-x, which is built into Emacs, needs to be explicitly loaded at compile time. This makes some parts of the code work as expected. Thanks to Mehdi Khawari for reporting the problem and Nicholas Vollmer for suggesting this change. The exchange took place in issue 1: https://github.com/protesilaos/cursory/issues/1. Users should already have this change, as I published a minor release for it (version 1.0.1).

  • Added some missing metadata to the manual. This is useful for the indices and COPYING section.

  • Updated the relevant links to the package sources. The main repository is now on GitHub.

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