New Emacs Package: store-git-link

Today I released an open source Emacs package: git-share.

This is my first real attempt at a proper Emacs package, bringing together some scattered elisp scripts I had in my config into a complete, unit-tested whole. I use this command just about every working day to send code links to colleagues across our different git repositories.

With Emacs 29 it's easy to install the package straight from the repository. Add these lines to your Emacs config:

(unless (package-installed-p 'git-share)
  (package-vc-install "https://github.com/mgmarlow/git-share"))

Invoke M-x git-share when your Emacs point is positioned on a line of code you'd like to share and the link will be copied (killed) to your system's clipboard.

Tips and Tricks

Here are some tips I stumbled on when building this package:

1. You can generate the comment boilerplate for your Emacs package with M-x auto-insert. It prompts you for a description and some tags, then fills in the requisite copyright notice, author fields, and other structural comments for your package. More info: Conventional Headers for Emacs Libraries.
2. Unit testing with ERT is really straightforward. I use this Makefile to run the test suite against the compiled (.elc) package.
3. When browsing for functions with C-h f it's easy to accidentally include ones that aren't shipped with Emacs, but are autoloaded by other packages (notably in my case, string helpers from s.el). Using ERT batch testing helped me find these problems since it works against the vanilla Emacs install.
4. Read the Emacs Lisp Coding Conventions.
5. Even if you're not contributing to MELPA, their contributing guidelines are a great source of tips.