dired-auto-readme VS package-lint

Simplest and narutal is to display three different windows; hide scrollbars and you will be left with very thin line (1 pixel wide) between windows. Alternatively you can do some tricks to work around the issue similar as to what org-mode does, or something similar as to what I do in dired-auto-readme. I don't suggest since you will be fighting Emacs, and there are many issues and problems with what org or my package do. There is a reason why org uses src_blocks, and while org is great and do awesome job at what it does, there are still issues that are not easily overcome when you scratch under the surface (for example font-lock is in certain cases spooking, you don't have major/minor mode maps in src blocks, eldoc is not working properly etc.

I have used Clemeras dired-git-info for a while, but it does not work well with my dired-auto-readme and dired-subtree from dired-hacks due to use of overlays.

I wrote a little addon to dired to automatically display readme files in directories if there is one. I use it all the time, autoloads with my dired. I also wrote an init file generator and manager that I use every day, as long as some small packages to cleanup org mode noise, summarized in org-view-mode. Generally I use elisp instead of bash to cleanup directories, batch rename files in some special folders according to some specific naming rules etc. I also wrote an elisp script to re-build emacs, lots of other small stuff I haven't published on my github. You can check here some small extras I wrote or adapted from others for my personal use.

If you need some example of using text properties, here is some of my code, not sure if it is very good example, but it is very short and hopefully easy to understand. Here is a bit more elaborated one, and here is a bit of unorthodox usage of Emacs, also using text properties to achieve the effect. I don't recommend anything for "stable" system, beside org-view-mode, rest are just experiments and idea tests.

I have just reworked dired-auto-readme, fixed some bugs and made it aware of org-view-mode, so now it is possible to see readme files written in org mode without markup in Dired buffers. For example, here is a screenshot of org-tree-slide package by T. Ishikawa, cloned from his GitHub repo.

My goal is to create a clean and minimal viewer, org-view-mode, which will generally hide everything but text and put org file in read only mode. I need it for my dired-auto-readme. In general, when I read other people's stuff, I don't care about their markup, I am just interested about the content. I don't understand why is there no such mode from the beginning.

Exactly! This is also why I like Compat. I have to read through the Emacs NEWS anyway, then I can just as well add the functions directly to Compat. The small downside however is that Compat pretends that some function is available in your Emacs. If you write a package you must look twice where a function is coming from. This should not be a problem if you use package-lint, which you should! But see also https://github.com/purcell/package-lint/issues/227.

Thank you for reading that far. If you have feedback, questions or improvement proposals, please let me know. I hope that Compat is useful for you. If you miss some important functionality, feel free to open an issue on the issue tracker. Any help in adding missing functionality is welcome. In case you are interested in upstream development, you may want to help with scanning through years of the Emacs Git log for added functionality. A laborious process, but the Emacs library diffs from package-lint are useful. Unfortunately package-lint does not yet support Compat and warns if you use compatibility functions. Also package-lint does not yet track argument number changes. Help with those package-lint issues would be greatly appreciated.

I would suggest using the checkdoc command in each of your package buffers. It will point out stylistic errors. flymake-mode will help catch byte-compilation errors as well. You should also install https://github.com/purcell/package-lint and M-x package-lint-current-buffer to get these up to par for MELPA.

(Note that the current minimum requirement for Emacs is set to 27.2, I'm pretty sure this can be lowered but I'm waiting on this issue for confirmation. Until then, if you have an older version, you should probably be able to install with quelpa just fine).

Also consider using checkdoc and package-lint before you publish stuff, it is really annoying to get warning pop-up for docs wider than 80 chars. Those are so easy to catch up. Generally, it is good to follow Melpa guidelines even if you don't plan to publish your package in Melpa.

I strongly suggest you to use package-lint when writing packages. It will point out all version mismatches, and some other things.