StartupCustomizer.jl

Easy customization of startup.jl

The goal of this package is to provide a simple and uniform way for other packages (like e.g. Revise.jl) to be installed into Julia's startup.jl file. Instead of having to locate, open and edit the file, with this package users could do something akin to:

julia> import StartupCustomizer
julia> StartupCustomizer.add(StartupCustomizer.Revise())

This would then install Revise.jl into the global environment and paste the initialization code into startup.jl without the user needing to know anything else.

Quick start

Once this is registered you can simply enter into your REPL:

julia> Pkg.add("StartupCustomizer")
# some output
julia> import StartupCustomizer
julia> StartupCustomizer.add(StartupCustomizer.Revise(), StartupCustomizer.OhMyREPL())
# Revise.jl and OhMyREPL.jl are now added to your startup.jl

Having Revise.jl and OhMyREPL.jl is probably a sensible default for most users.

User Guide

You can use:

• StartupCustomizer.which() to see where your startup file is,
• StartupCustomizer.status() to see what currently is in your startup.jl
• StartupCustomizer.list() to get a list of available modules
• StartupCustomizer.describe(module) to get detailed information on a module
• StartupCustomizer.add(module...)/StartupCustomizer.remove(module...) to add/remove modules
• StartupCustomizer.edit() to edit the startup.jl directly by hand.

Notably adding modules also installs required packages into the global default environment.

You can safely remove StartupCustomizer.jl after you modified your startup.jl with Pkg.remove("StartupCustomizer").

Currently available modules are:

• Revise: loads Revise.jl
• OhMyREPL: enables OhMyRepl.jl
• NumberedPrompt: Switches REPL to a IPython like numbered prompt style. See manual.
• PkgTemplates: defines a function template(; kwargs...) which can be customized for personal preference (see their documentation)

Developer Guide

The main concept of this package is that of a StartupModule which handles something you want to put into your startup.jl. All one needs to do to add something new is to make a subtype of AbstractStartupModule and implement 4 methods short_description, long_description, _dependencies and _generate. It is recommended to put the code a module emit into the /templates directory to keep things tidy and have editor support for writing that code.

For add,remove,status, this package scans startup.jl to determine what it has written there previously. Only parts that are recognized are ever altered. This package marks section by wrapping them in comments like # begin StartupCustomizer.Revise() and # end StartupCustomizer.Revise(). These comments also serve as storage for the parameters of the modules, so modules should take care that they are reconstructable from their string representation.