with-simulated-input

This package provides an Emacs Lisp macro, with-simulated-input, which evaluates one or more forms while simulating a sequence of input events for those forms to read. The result is the same as if you had evaluated the forms and then manually typed in the same input. This macro is useful for non-interactive testing of normally interactive commands and functions, such as completing-read.

For example:

(with-simulated-input
    "hello SPC world RET"
  (read-string "Say hello: "))

This would return the string "hello world".

Simulating idleness

Some interactive functions rely on idle timers to do their work, so you might need a way to simulate idleness. For that, there is the wsi-simulate-idle-time function. You can insert calls to this function in between input strings. For example, the following code will return "hello world".

;; Insert "world" after 500 seconds
(run-with-idle-timer 500 nil 'insert "world")
(with-simulated-input
    ;; Type "hello ", then "wait" 501 seconds, then type "RET"
    '("hello SPC" (wsi-simulate-idle-time 501) "RET")
  (read-string "Enter a string: "))

Note that this code only pretends to be idle for 501 seconds. It actually runs immediately.

In fact, you can put any lisp code in between input strings in this way.

Get it from MELPA: https://stable.melpa.org/#/with-simulated-input

Running the tests

This package comes with a test suite. If you want to run it yourself, first install the cask dependency manager. Then, from the package directory, run cask install to install all the development dependencies, in particular buttercup. Finally, to run the tests, execute cask exec buttercup -L .. You should see something like this:

$ cask exec buttercup -L .
Running 17 specs.

`with-simulated-input'
  should work for basic string input
  should throw an error if the input is incomplete
  should allow the input to trigger errors
  should ignore extra input after BODY has completed
  should allow multiple functions in BODY to read input
  should allow aborting via C-g in KEYS
  used with `completing-read'
    should work with unambiguous tab completion
    should work with ambiguous tab completion
    should fail to exit with ambiguous completion and `require-match'Making completion list...

    should fail to exit with ambiguous completion and `require-match'
  using lisp forms in KEYS argument of `with-simulated-input'
    should allow evaluating arbitrary lisp forms
    should allow lisp forms to throw errors
    should not interpret lisp forms once BODY has finished

`wsi-simulate-idle-time'
  should run idle timers
  should not run idle times with longer times
  should run idle timers added by other idle timers
  should run idle timers added by other idle timers when the new timer is in the past
  used within `with-simulated-input'
    should allow idle timers to trigger during simulated input

Ran 17 specs, 0 failed, in 0.6 seconds.

Please run the tests before submitting any pull requests, and note in the pull request whether any of the tests fail.