Paradox

Project for modernizing Emacs' Package Menu. With improved appearance, mode-line information. Github integration, customizability, asynchronous upgrading, and more.

Here are some visual comparisons:

Regular Package Menu

Paradox

Paradox (multi-line)

These screenshots use smart-mode-line, but a similar effect is obtained with the regular mode-line.

Usage

Paradox can be installed from Melpa with

M-x package-install RET paradox

It can also be installed manually in the usual way, just be mindful of the dependencies.

To use it, simply call M-x paradox-list-packages (instead of the regular list-packages). This will give you most features out of the box. If you want to be able to star packages as well, just configure the paradox-github-token variable then call paradox-list-packages again.

If you'd like to stop using Paradox, you may call paradox-disable (or just restart Emacs) and go back to using the regular list-packages.

Use Paradox as the Default Interface

In order to use the Paradox interface by default (and just having to call the standard list-packages command), add the following in your init file:

(require 'paradox)
(paradox-enable)

Current Features

Several Improvements

Paradox implements many small improvements to the package menu itself. They all work out of the box and are completely customizable! (Also, hit h to see all keys.)

• Visit the package's homepage with v (or just use the provided buttons).
• View a list of recent commits with l.
• Use paradox-require instead of require to automatically install absent packages.
• Shortcuts for package filtering:
  • f r filters by regexp.
  • f u display only packages with upgrades.
  • f k filters by keyword (emacs 24.4 only).
  • f s filters by user starred packages.

And some more...

• hl-line-mode enabled by default.
• Display useful information on the mode-line and cleanup a bunch of useless stuff.
• Customization! Just call M-x paradox-customize to see what you can do.
  • Customize column widths.
  • Customize faces (paradox-star-face, paradox-status-face-alist and paradox-archive-face).
  • Customize local variables.

Execution Hook

Paradox defines a hook called paradox-after-execute-functions. Functions added to this hook are run whenever packages are installed, deleted, or upgraded. This is used to implement part of the Paradox functionality, which makes it very easy to customize and extend.

• A full report is available at the *Paradox Report* buffer. You can disable this feature with:

    (remove-hook 'paradox--report-buffer-print 'paradox-after-execute-functions)
  

• If the upgrade was performed without querying the user (which happens when paradox-execute is called with a prefix argument), then the report buffer is displayed at the end. You can disable this feature with:

    (remove-hook 'paradox--report-buffer-display-if-noquery 'paradox-after-execute-functions)
  

• A message is printed in the echo area with a brief summary of the transaction. You can disable this feature with:

    (remove-hook 'paradox--report-message 'paradox-after-execute-functions)
  

Package Ratings

Paradox also integrates with GitHub Stars, which works as rough package rating system. That is, Paradox package menu will:

1. Display the number of GitHub Stars each package has (assuming it's in a github repo, of course);
2. Possibly automatically star packages you install, and unstar packages you delete (you will be asked the first time whether you want this);
3. Let you star and unstar packages by hitting the s key;
4. Let you star all packages you have installed with M-x paradox-star-all-installed-packages.

Item 1. will work out of the box, the other items obviously require a github account (Paradox will help you generate a token the first time you call paradox-list-packages).

Known Bugs

• On some cases there's an annoying gnutls error message after downloading the star counts gnutls.c: [0] (Emacs) fatal error: The TLS connection was non-properly terminated.. If anyone knows how to fix it, I'm all ears.

How Star Displaying Works

We generate a map of Package Name -> Repository from Melpa's recipe directory, some repos may correspond to more than one package. This map is used count the stars a given package has. This doesn't mean you need Melpa to see the star counts, the numbers will be displayed regardless of what archives you use.

Currently, packages that are not hosted on GitHub are listed with a blank star count, which is clearly different from 0-star packages (which are displayed with a 0, obviously). If you know of an alternative that could be used for these packages, open an issue here, I'd love to hear.