emacs-direnv VS eglot

env-commander-mode is a simple mode which allows any shell commands that Emacs invokes to run one or more commands beforehand to initialize the shell environment. There are many Emacs packages which can configure process environments, for example, direnv, but they lack the ability to go a step further and define shell functions and aliases, which is often required by "virtual environment" tools. For those who prefer interacting with shell commands via shell-command rather than shell, eshell, or term, env-commander-mode is here to assist.

I'm using nix to manage python dependencies (see excerpt of flake.nix below) but this means those python dependencies are in a /nix directory, so when lsp tries to figure out project root for them, it thinks they have nothing to do with my own project. Also I'm using emacs-direnv to transparently switch into nix environments (.envrc + use flake), so direnv (correctly) unloads my LSP executable (configured in flake.nix), so even if they should be considered totally separate projects LSP-mode doesn't know how to start up the server.

I've had a good experience with direnv[1] and emacs-direnv[2].

Direnv can automatically load an environment when you enter a directory, so it automatically "opens" virtualenvs/nix shells/etc. The Emacs direnv mode ensures that each buffer sees the direnv mode for its project directory.

I've found this to be a great compromise between automatic behavior on the one hand and transparency + control on the other—I get the right environment loaded automatically very consistently and, if something goes wrong, I can open a shell and poke around to see what's going on (is my nix shell messed up? is the right tool not loaded via direnv? etc). The only time I need to do anything manually is if I make a change to the environment and need to update Emacs about it, in which case I just run M-x direnv-update-environment.

Once I got this set up, I can just rely on executable-find to check for (and find) exactly the right tool on a per-project basis—no more worrying about global or seeing the wrong version of a tool. This also made it easy to do stuff like only run formatting if the corresponding tool is available: I add hooks to various programming language modes that only turn on lsp/formatting/etc if executable-find sees the corresponding executable.

Compared to the hassle I've had to go through helping my colleagues debug VSCode not seeing the right conda environment, virtualenv or the right version of various tools, Emacs + direnv has been a far nicer and more consistent experience.

[1]: https://direnv.net/

[2]: https://github.com/wbolster/emacs-direnv

Alternatively from what /u/hantva said, you can try using direnv and its integration with Emacs. This has a benefit of scaling better if you have more than one such project as each set of env vars is separate.

I'm using lorri and emacs-direnv together, works perfectly fine for me.

Thanks, I'll check this out if I can't get my ideal setup to work. Presume you meant this: https://github.com/wbolster/emacs-direnv ?

I first install direnv which allows me to have a different environment per directory, or in my case, a project. And there is a project that connects Emacs to this. https://github.com/wbolster/emacs-direnv

I use this to source .envrc files into my emacs environment: https://github.com/wbolster/emacs-direnv

almost. to integrate with a shell, you would indeed hook it onto the shell's prompt function. to integrate it with Emacs, you would use https://github.com/wbolster/emacs-direnv , so Emacs sees the project specific process environment too. the isolation is primarily achieved by setting up a custom PATH, PYTHON_PATH and similar vars

Recently I stumbled upon this issue:

https://github.com/joaotavora/eglot/discussions/1127

I don't know enough about emacs and LSP to see the full picture, but it seems that both eglot's and corfu's maintainers, assumably very competent programmers, can't find a solution for this.

I only skimmed the thread. My understanding is that LSP dumps a long list of completion candidates at once and they can't decide a cache strategy that works well with existing code...?

It could be. There are unfixed issues with eglot and corfu, and sadly not a lot of willingness to investigate.

Eglot errors when I add new Python code blocks. The error disappears when I reconnect the language server, but the same happens again when I add a new code block. My "workaround" now is that before I start working on the .qmd file, I just add a bunch of Python code blocks (for which I also have a function) and then reconnect the language server again. This way I can start working for a while until I need to add more code blocks again.

This discussion has helped with some performance issues: https://github.com/joaotavora/eglot/discussions/993.

I guess eglot doesn't support it yet: https://github.com/joaotavora/eglot/pull/839

This is not by pure chance, João is the developer of the Eglot LSP client and the breadcrumbs from LSP-mode had been requested as a feature, but as far as I remember João thought rightfully that this could be an independent package, see https://github.com/joaotavora/eglot/discussions/988

A substantial section of the community is using corfu instead of company, but I wouldn't say company is out of date by any means. In emacs 29 eglot will be a built in, which might act as a replacement for lsp-mode depending on what functionality you need.

I am currently running emacs 29 (built from emacs-29 branch) which – according to https://github.com/joaotavora/eglot – should contain the latest eglot.

Yep. You can use flymake or flycheck for that in combination with eglot or lsp-mode.

See https://github.com/joaotavora/eglot#diagnostics

(I have reported this (that is, ElDoc missing docs for callable things at point, when Eglot is enabled) as an issue recently: First on GitHub-discussions https://github.com/joaotavora/eglot/discussions/1200, then on Debbugs https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=62687. But the threads are very long, so I don't recommend reading them.)