This package is no more maintained and not fully working.
Helm System Packages is an Emacs-based interface to the package manager of your operating system /and/ remote systems as well.
Emacs' knowledge is not required: see the [[stand-alone][stand-alone]] folder for a version targeted at non-Emacs users. Run the script and everything should be self-explanatory. If not then it's a bug, please report it.
Start ~helm-system-packages~ to list all available packages (with installed packages as well as dependencies displayed in their own respective face). Fuzzy-search, mark and execute the desired action over any selections of packages:
Helm System Packages provides a uniform interface over the following package managers:
Some package managers come with their specific actions and even specific Helm sources, e.g. Portage's USE flags.
There is only one entry point: ~helm-system-packages~.
Use the persistent action to view the details of the marked packages.
Most actions can be called with a prefix argument to insert the result at point.
If started from a remote TRAMP buffer (e.g. dired, Eshell or just any remote file), ~helm-system-packages~ automatically switches to the packages of the remote system. The remote package manager can be different from the local one.
** Maintenance & other operations
Helm System Packages only works over lists of packages. It does not feature any maintenance-related operations such as cleaning the cache or synchronizing the database.
[[https://github.com/jabranham/system-packages][system-packages]] is an Emacs package providing Emacs with universal commands for such operations. It is unrelated to Helm System Packages but both work well together.
** Privileges
Transactions such as installing and removing packages are run via the sudo
command in Eshell.
If you'd like to cache the password for, say, an hour, you can configure Eshell
to use its own version of sudo via TRAMP:
: (require 'em-tramp) : (setq password-cache t) : (setq password-cache-expiry 3600)
Most of the package managers GUIs out there do not provide much efficiency over their commandline counterparts.
The commandline workflow is centered around a cumbersome try-repeat loop:
With Helm all those actions get factored into one. Helm sessions can also be resumed.
Screencasts
Display information of multiple packages in an Org buffer, resume the search and finally install.
[[./screencasts/helm-system-packages-info-and-install.gif]]
Use Helm to find files of multiple packages across different sources.
[[./screencasts/helm-system-packages-find-files.gif]]
Use Helm to explore the graph of the (reverse) dependencies.
[[./screencasts/helm-system-packages-deps.gif]]
Development
WARNING: The programming interface is still under development and is prone to change.
Each module is rather straightforward, it only needs to define the following:
The =helm-system-packages.el= file provides some helper functions for Helm actions.
Roadmap ** TODO Strengthen the interface with structures TODO Factor all "info" actions? We can add Org subsections for files, dependencies, etc. Those sections should be folded by default.
We probably still need specific "info" actions to insert at point. TODO Use bindings reflecting helm-list-elisp-packages TODO [#A] Port factorization to dpkg, portage TODO [#A] Port TRAMP support to brew Add option to display multiline candidates for long descriptions. *** With filtering, the displayed condidates won't include those above the candidate limit Can we include as many filtered candidates as possible?