I’ve been working on a simple mode to manage my blog entries using Emacs and Jekyll.

The mode is available at https://github.com/nibrahim/Hyde.

Following is a brief users guide

Usage

Download the all the hyde-*.el files and put them somewhere. Once you do that, add the directory where you put it to your load path like so and require it.

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    (add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/hyde*.el")
    (require 'hyde)

Operation

This mode is a simply a wrapped for a number of shell commands that are used to create and deploy the site. It doesn’t maintain any local state (in the form of status files etc.) so if you change your repository manually outside it, just refreshing the buffer will bring it upto date.

It’s tailored to the way I work. I keep my posts in a git repository (although I do have a crude DVCS abstraction layer if you’re using hg or any other such system). I make changes, commit them and push the repository to github (you can, for example, see this files source at github). After that, I make the site using jekyll manually and then copy it over to my webspace using rsync. I don’t use any of the git hooks (yet).

Customisation

The variables that you might care to customise are

  • Location parameters
    • hyde-home : The root directory of your blog
    • hyde-deploy-dir : The directory where jekyll will generate the site for you to deploy
    • hyde-posts-dir : The directory that will contain the actual posts (this is relative to hyde-home and is _posts by default).
    • hyde/deploy-command : The command used to deploy the site. scp, rsync or whatever else you might please.
  • VC parameters
    • hyde/vc-uncommittedp : Predicate to check whether the file is uncommitted
    • hyde/vc-unpushedp : Predicate to check whether the file is not yet pushed
    • hyde/vc-pushedp : Predicate to check if the file has been pushed (inverse of the above)
    • hyde/vc-add : Command to add the file
    • hyde/vc-commit : Command to commit a file
    • hyde/vc-push : Command to push the local changes to the remote end.

Interface

The main interface looks like the following screenshot

Hyde screenshot

The list of posts are presented on top along with a key of what the letters before the post names mean. The post names are also colourised accordingly

The keys you can use at this time are

  • n : Create a new post (it will be a draft)
  • c : Commit the current post
  • P : Push all pending commits (this is only a VC push. Not deployment).
  • j : Run jekyll and create the new version of the site
  • d : Deploy the site.
  • g : Refresh posts (useful if you’ve done something by hand earlier)
  • p : Promote a post from a draft to a a published post
  • q : Quit hyde.
  • RET : Open the current post for editing.

The markdown mode in which the buffers open up for editing is slightly modified. It has a few extra covenience bindings

  • C-c C-c : Save file and finish editing
  • C-c C-v : Preview file (this is a markdown preview so extra liquid tags will not work).

It seems to work reasonably well. This post was created, committed and deployed using hyde. There are of course lots of bugs to fix but it’s usable. Here are a few things I can think of

  • Post drafts
  • Proper previews (using a local jekyll server)
  • Status of deployment for the posts to be displayed

Please give it a shot. I welcome your feedback.

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