Fast feedback loop with emacs (Lua)

Here's a long overdue post about emacs fiddling. All this belongs to my previous job time, during the past 3 years doing Lua.

One of the major test frameworks in Lua is Busted. It uses an rspec-inspired syntax and the cli accepts flags to filter the tests you want to run, by file and regular expression.

To iterate as fast as I could, I'd want to lock on a particular test, and be able to run that same test for a while. That's super useful while hacking on a feature or fixing a single test.

So the solution I came with was to use our beloved emacs, to find the current test the cursor is on, and remember it in a global variable. Of course, I want it in the most dwim-y way, so the same binding does "the right thing" most of the times.

Here's the decision making proces, that starts calling rgc-run-test (bound to f7):

rgc-run-test

If I'm in a *_spec.lua file, the process sets a global var with the current file path. The process also looks for the closest previous line to my cursor that looks like a test definition and sets another variable with the string of the test. To recognize the test definition, I match the lines against "it(", "describe(", or "it_content_types(". I use 'rx' library for that, which is pretty cool, check that out if you're doing complex regexes in elisp.

rgc-test-shell

After that, we find a buffer with a shell.

If there's none currently open, I create one, using the right parameters (so it lands on the correct directory).

An extra nicety is that I call 'highlight-regexp' with a string that will highlight any debug line.

You can enable (add-hook 'shell-mode-hook 'compilation-shell-minor-mode), making all shell buffers to run compilation-shell-minor-mode. That means that every line that looks like a path/to/source.file:line becomes clickable. That means that you can navigate to the source:line from a stacktrace.

With this, you can press F7 in a test file, and this snippet will make sure that a shell is in the right place (opening an existing one if it's already there) and will run the current test. 

But, many times, you are not just editing the test, but you're touching the code. No problem. F7 remembers the latest test you run when you were in a test file, so it will run that same test in case you're not in a test file.

When things seem to be solved, you then want to run the tests in that same file, but not restricting it to that single test, but run the whole file, to make sure you didn't mess up anything else. C-u F7 will do just that.

rgc-test-flags

Last cool thing. Sometimes I want to lock extra flags for the tests, rgc-test-flags is a quick way to overload the flags and keep them around for the next runs also.

ffap

Also, sometimes, the test errors in lua are marked like 'path/to/file @ 98'.  This makes find-file-at-point miss the line number.  But yeah, emacs. you defadvice find-file-at-point, with an extra case and off you go.

 That's it

I know this whole thing is quite hackish, and there's a lot to chew in just 50 lines, but this was so useful to me that I wanted to share before I forgot about it (changed job recently so I'm not using this snippet anymore)

It's this kind of workflows that the holistic approach of emacs allow for. And we love it so much :)

Here's the gist of it: