minemacs

MinEmacs FAQ

This file assembles solutions to some of the known issues and answers some of the frequently asked questions about MinEmacs.

Trump gets stuck when trying to open a file via SSH

Sometimes, when trying to open a distant file via SSH on Tramp, it can get stuck. A common reason for this can be the prompt pattern on the distant machine. Tramp have a variable tramp-shell-prompt-pattern that gets used to detect if tramp got a valid shell prompt or not (checking for $ or #, among other stuff). In machines using fancy shell configurations (Oh-my-Zsh, Oh-my-Bash, …), the prompt can be different from the defaults. In these cases, you need to add this to your distant machine .zshrc or .bashrc:

[[ $TERM == "dumb" ]] && unsetopt zle && PS1='$ ' && return

More information can be found here.

Using `parinfer-rust-mode` in a non `x86_64` platform

The parinfer-rust-mode package provide precompiled libraries for Linux, Windows and MacOS, but only for x86_64 machines. If you have a CPU (like M1 or other ARM based CPUs) of another architecture (aarch64, arm32, arm64, …), you can compile the library from source as described in the project’s documentation, and then add this to your config.el:

(setq parinfer-rust-library "/path/to/your/parinfer-rust-library.so")

Exporting Org documents in background ends with errors

In some circumstances, you can get an error when trying to export an Org file to PDF. For example, after hitting SPC m e l p, you get short after, the message "Org async export finised, see Org Export Process for more details.".

With something like this in the *Org Export Process* buffer:

Using MinEmacs’ “me-org-export-async-init.el” as init file. Loading “init.el” in an org-export-async context. Symbol s function definition is void: evil-snipe-mode

Error: void-function (evil-snipe-mode)
  mapbacktrace(#f(compiled-function (evald func args flags) #<bytecode 0x187e658465ae87e8>))
  debug-early-backtrace()
  debug-early(error (void-function evil-snipe-mode))
  (evil-snipe-mode 1)
  eval-buffer(#<buffer  *load*-90736> nil "/home/abougouffa/.minemacs.d/config.el" nil t)
  load-with-code-conversion("/home/abougouffa/.minemacs.d/config.el" "/home/abougouffa/.minemacs.d/config.el" nil t)
  load("~/.minemacs.d/config.el" nil t)
  (progn nil (load user-config nil (not minemacs-verbose-p)))
  (if (file-exists-p user-config) (progn nil (load user-config nil (not minemacs-verbose-p))))
  (let ((user-config (concat minemacs-config-dir "config.el"))) (if (file-exists-p user-config) (progn nil (load user-config nil (not minemacs-verbose-p)))))
  eval-buffer(#<buffer  *load*-220865> nil "/home/abougouffa/.emacs.d/init.el" nil t)
  load-with-code-conversion("/home/abougouffa/.emacs.d/init.el" "/home/abougouffa/.emacs.d/init.el" nil t)
  load("~/.emacs.d/init.el" nil t)
  eval-buffer(#<buffer  *load*> nil "/home/abougouffa/.emacs.d/modules/extras/me-org-export-async-init.el" nil t)
  load-with-code-conversion("/home/abougouffa/.emacs.d/modules/extras/me-org-export-async-init.el" "/home/abougouffa/.emacs.d/modules/extras/me-org-export-async-init.el" nil t)
  load("/home/abougouffa/.emacs.d/modules/extras/me-org-export-async-init.el" nil t)
  command-line-1(("-l" "/home/abougouffa/.emacs.d/modules/extras/me-org-export-async-init.el" "-l" "/tmp/org-export-processktJyzH"))
  command-line()
      normal-top-level()

To resolve this, we need to understand how MinEmacs configures Org-mode’s asynchronous export. By default, MinEmacs enables org-export-in-background to export documents asynchronously (in a child Emacs process). As this process do not need all of MinEmacs installed package, so there is a minimalist init file in modules/extras/me-org-export-async-init.el which will be used by default for the org-export-async-init-file variable.

Therefore, if you invoke -in your config.el- a feature that is not enabled in the minimalist init file, you will get random errors related to that. In the example above, Emacs is complaining about evil-snipe-mode because we have call to (evil-snipe-mode 1) in the config.el, however, evil and it’s related packages are not enabled in the minimalist init file.

The minimalist init file provides a feature named me-org-export-async-init, so you can add conditional blocks in your config.el to be executed (or not) when this feature is present (i.e., when running in an Org async export context).

So, to resolve this issue, you can either:

Fix your config.el by using with-eval-after-load blocks and by conditioning the problematic code.

(with-eval-after-load 'projectile
  (do-some-extra-stuff))

;; Avoid running this block in org-export context
(unless (featurep 'me-org-export-async-init)
  (do-something))

Disable org-export-in-background using:

(with-eval-after-load 'org
  (setq org-export-in-background nil))

Or, you can revert to Org-mode’s default behavior for the child export process (will use MinEmacs’ init.el file):

(with-eval-after-load 'org
  ;; You can also set it to your own custom init.el, just do not forget to
  ;; provide `me-org-export-async-init' in it.
  (setq org-export-async-init-file nil))

The `Odd length text property list` error

For some reason, exporting Org documents in background can fail with this error:

(error "Odd length text property list")

In such a case, you can remove the Org cache directory then try to export again.

# Remove the Org cache directory
rm -rf ~/.emacs.d/local/cache/org/

See this comment for more information.

Debugging MinEmacs

Sometimes Emacs might freezes and stop responding, the reflex in this case is to use C-g to call keyboard-quit which signals a “quit” condition. If Emacs stay frozen, you can send SIGUSR2 via a terminal, this should stop the running code and show a backtrace.

kill -s SIGUSR2 $(pidof emacs)

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