Following wise suggestions: making emacs-with-nyxt more consistent

This is a "thank you" post, really. Sometimes ago I shared my emacs-with-nyxt hack on Reddit, and the user "trararawe" pointed out that there were too many sleep-for in there.

I confess it could have totally stayed a hack if that user didn't inspire me to clean up my code: so thank you!

Since there is chance I could get some more nice suggestions, let me explain what I did.

There are a few bits of the integration between Nyxt and Emacs that go totally asynchronous.

The first is running Nyxt. When the browser starts it needs some setup to be ready to use via Emacs. We cannot continue until Nyxt is ready. The following code does the trick.

(async-shell-command (format "nyxt -e \"(nyxt-user::start-swank)\""))

That code will also start the Swank server to link to Slime. Since we need to wait, I came up with waiting about half a second before continuing. As "trararawe" said, guessing a time is fragile because my system is different from others. Both we are wasting people time or we are making them fail in starting Nyxt.

So I replaced that code with the following.

(async-shell-command (format "nyxt -e \"(nyxt-user::start-swank)\""))
(while (not (ignore-errors (not (emacs-with-nyxt-slime-connect "localhost" "4006"))))
  (sleep-for emacs-with-nyxt-slime-nyxt-delay))
(while (not (ignore-errors (string= "NYXT-USER" (slime-current-package))))
  (sleep-for emacs-with-nyxt-slime-nyxt-delay))

This is a bit ugly, but still a solution. We now exploit Slime to tell us when its connection is ready. When Slime establishes a connection then we can assume Nyxt is ready too. If it is not, we wait a little and try again. I should probably add a circuit break in there (to eventually exit). Ehrm... anyhow. We do something similar in the next line. You see, even if Swank is ready, the Nyxt Common Lisp package may not be available yet. Lucky us, Slime can tell us which package is available now. Nyxt set this to NYXT-USER by default. And this is the package we wait to have.

Once these things are ready, we can start interacting with the Common Lisp REPL.

That is also another bit that is asynchronous. It seems that Slime connects to Swank at its own time. So just to be sure, I added another while loop that hold our horses until Slime is ready.

(defun emacs-with-nyxt-slime-connect (host port)
  "Connect Slime to HOST and PORT ignoring version mismatches."
  (slime-connect host port)
  (while (not (slime-connected-p))
   (sleep-for emacs-with-nyxt-slime-nyxt-delay)))

And that is it. With these changes I made the hack work without picking a random waiting time.

Now if you have some other useful suggestion, I am happy to hear :)

Happy Lisping!