Sink.el provides a global minor mode allowing Emacs to receive and respond to messages from the Plan9 plumber via its ports interface along with a small set of utilities for handling messages. Out of the box, messages are received on the edit port and display the plumbed file to the user in an intelligent way. The standard address format is supported, for example, plumbing "notes.org:20" will open the file notes.org at line 20.
sink-mode is currently intended as basic library to support further user customisation via elisp.
- Install Plan9Port, and ensure that its programs are in $PATH
- Start the plan9 plumber by running
plumber - M-x
sink-mode - Try plumbing a file name from the shell with
plumb <filename>or from Emacs withsink-plumb-dwim - See source for implementation details and plumb(7) for information about defining rules and sending messages
sink-mode- activate/deactivate sink-modesink-port-alist- Alist of port-name . function pairs. While sink-mode is active function will be called with a parsed plumbing message whenever a message is received on the associated port. This is the main point of customisation, see inbuilt help for further details.sink-plumb- Send a given string to the plumber.sink-plumb-dwim- Send either current region or the filename at point to the plumber.
User customisation is intended through the sink-port-alist
variable. Handler functions listed in this variable are called with a
pmsg structure as their only argument whenever a message is
received on the associated port. Ports are named without any leading
directories or namespaces; "edit", not "plumb/edit".
A pmsg's components can be accessed through the following functions:
sink-pmsg-src- Source of message - typically the sending program.sink-pmsg-dst- Destination (port) of message.sink-pmsg-wdir- Working directory.sink-pmsg-type- Data type. Usually "text", see the plumb documentation for others.sink-pmsg-attr- Alist of attribute-value pairs. Attribute values are either strings or nil.sink-pmsg-ndata- Number of bytes in data segment.sink-pmsg-data- Message data.
In addition, the function plumbmsg-attr-addr is provided to return the
value of the addr attribute as an integer (or nil), since it's often used.
I use sink heavily as part of my own workflow with a lot of additional functionality. However that also involves custom plumbing rules which are hard to distribute. If others are interested I'm very open to PRs to improve the default behaviour and build sink into more of a complete package.
Since plumbing messages are received through asynchronous processes there's no guarantee any function call will receive the complete message. I use this daily and it's never been an issue, but it theoretically may be if the message is particularly large or arrives under heavy load.
- Sink does not implement the 9p protocol in Elisp. All communication with the plumber is via plan9port's 9p utility.
- Sink does not provide any facilities for running GNUEmacs on Plan9/9Front.