boop.el

Boop Is a tool designed to radiate state unobtrusively in the mode-line.

Very often you see dashboards littered across the floors of start ups and companies a like designed to monitor the state of something, usually with red, green, yellow or blue widgets that tell you something is either broken or stable etc.

The problem is, these dashboards often get over-saturated with widgets and all the colours just become noise.

Boop is designed to replicate the purpose of a dashboard from within Emacs. You can configure Boop to run scripts (plugins) periodically and convert the results into coloured dots in your mode-line.

Installation

Clone this repository and add it to Emac's load-path. Then require the file:

(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/cloned/repo")
(require 'boop)

Then start boop by running

(boop-start)

Defining a Config

In order to start monitoring things using Boop you will need to do one of two things,

• Set/Add to boop-config-alist
• Add to boop-update-hook

boop-config-alist

This variable defines items to monitor and the plugin scripts used to monitor them, each entry in the alist is made of an id and a plist.

The plist should contain a;

• :script symbol which matches a plugin name,
• &optional :args which is a list of string arguments to be passed into the script
• &optional :group a group symbol to associate this config item with
• &optional :onselect a function which will be evaluated when the boop is clicked

For example,

(setq boop-config-alist
    ;; ID                   PLIST
    '((contract-validation  :script examplejenkins
                            :args ("my-jenkins.co.uk" "contract-validation")
                            :group backend
                            :onselect (lambda () (interactive) 
										(browse-url "http://my-jenkins.co.uk/job/contract-validation")))

     (service-js            :script examplejenkins
                            :args ("my-jenkins.co.uk" "service-js")
                            :group backend)

     (html-client           :script status
                            :onselect (lambda () (interactive) (message "Yes this is working")))))

boop-update-hook

This hook is run whenever boop-update-info is called. When the hooks run, it is expected that they will end by calling the boop function.

For example,

(add-hook 'boop-update-hook
;;                  BOOP ID                               PASS STATUS   UNKNOWN STATUS
 '(lambda () (boop 'project-open (if (boundp 'project-id) 1             2))))

Plugins

Plugins are used to delegate the heavy lifting of the monitoring. These scripts should echo or print the result that matches the formats defined in boop-format-alist.

You can customise boop-format-alist to cover whatever return types you need.

By default, plugins are found in ~/.boopelplugins, but this directory can be customised by setting the variable boop-plugins-dir.