Instant previews using grip

Emacs needs to be buitl with xwidgets support.

I don't use many flags when compiling for MacOS, so the following configure command is what I most recently used:

  ./configure --with-mailutils --with-xwidgets

The public api requests to github are easily rate limited, so I'm configuring ~/.authinfo.gpg file with my github credentials and letting grip-mode use them.

I'll prefer to use the encrypted approach (~/.authinfo.gpg) and let Emacs automatically decrypt the file when my GPG key is imported.

  machine api.github.com login augustfengd password _

I've been using Spacemacs for many years now and aim leverage the builtin layers for customization.

This is one of the few exceptions where I need to be a little more involved because there is no layer that includes the grip-mode package anymore.

I maintain an augustfengd layer to concentrate any of these custom configurations.

It integrates the following code.

  (defconst augustfengd-packages
    grip-mode)

  (defun augustfengd/init-grip-mode ()
    ;; grip-mode requires the 'python-shell-interpreter to be configured.
    (require 'python))

  (defun augustfengd/post-init-grip-mode ()
    (require 'auth-source)
    (let ((credential (auth-source-user-and-password "api.github.com")))
      (setq grip-github-user (car credential)
            grip-github-password (cadr credential))))

The grip-mode package uses the grip tool, which is distributed as a python package.

Luckily the python layer from Spacemacs includes the pyvenv package. This package includes the M-x pyvenv-workon command that lets us use a python virtual environment.

I create the virtual environment like so:

  python3 -m venv ~/.virtualenvs/grip # ~/.virtualenvs is the default expected folder of pyvenv.
  source ~/.virtualenvs/grip/bin/activate
  python3 -m pip install grip
  deactivate