Emacs Taskrunner

This is an elisp library which aims to provide a way to retrieve all of the tasks/targets from various build systems and execute them in a compilation buffer.

The ultimate goal is to use this library to provide the data necessary for an interactive interface through helm/ivy/ido which will let the user select tasks and run them. Additionally, it will also provide a task caching mechanism so the tasks do not have to be retrieved over and over again.

Warning: I have not worked with most of these build systems/taskrunners but support has been provided for them. Since my knowledge is fairly elementary, I might miss some subtleties. If you have any advice then please feel free to open a pull request/issue on this repository. Thanks

Installation

To install this library, you will need the following dependencies:

• Emacs version 25.1 and above
• projectile
• emacs-async

In addition, you will also need to install one(or more if you would like) of these frontends:

• ivy-taskrunner
• helm-taskrunner
• Ido frontend is still in progress. Please use one of the other 2 for now.

Project Status

Currently, this project is stable. It makes quite a lot of assumptions about build/taskrunner configuration files being present at the root only and not nested in the file hierarchy of the project.

Supported Systems

It can be used for the following systems/frontends listed below.

Currently supported

Build/Task Systems

• [X] yarn/npm
• [X] Gulp
• [X] Grunt
• [X] Gradle
• [X] Jake
• [X] Apache ant
• [X] mix
• [X] leinengen
• [X] rake
• [X] Make
• [X] CMake
• [X] Meson/Ninja
• [X] go-task
• [X] mage
• [X] doit
• [X] mask
• [X] just
• [X] cargo-make
• [X] buidler
• [X] Tusk
• [X] dobi
• [X] cargo(Limited Support)
• [X] go compiler(Limited support)
• [X] Cask(Limited Support)
• [X] stack(Limited Support)
• [X] cabal(Limited Support)

User interfaces

• [X] ivy
• [X] helm
• [ ] ido (Work in progress. Coming Soon!)

Planned improvements

• [ ] Use ripgrep/ag/grep to locate task files. This will help find nested Makefiles and other task files which need to be parsed.
• [ ] Add Smart/Dumb support. Smart support will use ripgrep/ag/grep and “Dumb” support will work very similarly to the way it is done now. This is if the user does not have any of those installed or they would not like to spawn too many ripgrep/ag/grep processes on their system.
• [ ] Add support for more taskrunners/build systems.

Planning to add support for

• [ ] Apache maven
• [ ] waf
• [ ] pants
• [ ] phulp
• [ ] foy
• [ ] tasks.json(VSCode)
• [ ] Ninja
• [ ] sbt
• [ ] Buck
• [ ] Bazel
• [ ] msbuild(Maybe)

API

The API for taskrunner is slowly being documented here. It is not yet complete but the majority of the basics are there.

Design Choices

Async vs Sync

This library comes with both sync and async functions. Originally, everything worked synchronously but obviously Emacs froze and was unresponsive. For most taskrunners/build systems, it took only 1-3 seconds for the tasks to be retrieved. On the other hand most Java based systems(gradle is the worst) will take 5-9 seconds to start up and spit out a list of tasks. As a result, emacs-async was used as a way to avoid freezing the UI while tasks were being retrieved.

Under the hood, this whole library is synchronous and starts synchronous processes in order to coordinate the way tasks are retrieved. Most projects use a single build system/taskrunner but for others(web projects for example) might use multiple(gulp and package.json/npm scripts and so on…). If the tasks are retrieved asynchronously from the start then it becomes very difficult to synchronize the way the tasks are added to caches and might cause data races. Emacs 26 brought mutexes but those will freeze the UI as well while they are waiting.

Threads vs emacs-async

Emacs 26 brough threads but they are cooperative. This means that processes which take a long time(cough, cough, Gradle and its daemon) will still freeze the UI even when being ran on a separate thread. Due to this, emacs-async is used even though the Emacs which runs this library might have threads available.