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  • Hi everyone. In this lightening talk, I would like to present MPDel, which is a user interface for MPD, the Music Player Daemon, that's implemented in Emacs Lisp and runs entirely within Emacs. So it relies on Music Player Daemon, which is quite old because it's a sixteen years old project serving music with many different clients. So if I look at clients of MPD you see there are all different kinds so this ?android? projects or web projects or GTK projects and a curses project, web projects, so yeah many different kinds of clients. MPDel is implemented in Emacs Lisp, it's divided into three parts. So there is a library libmpdel, which is it's own project. That's doesn't propose any user interface, but instead it proposes a set of primitive functions to build user interfaces on top. Then you have the screenshot here on top of the MPDel, so it's mostly tabulated lists based, and then you have another UI which is based on ?IV?, and I will present ?the? two user interfaces in this context of this project. So let's start the video by navigating the music database. So it's a simple job to get the list of all your artists. You can navigate with ?turned-out? shortcuts. And you have isearch obviously ?for? imenu, and so I can go to ?pink? sites with quick shortcuts. When you select your artists you can go to which album by pressing return, and to go from an album to a particular artist's songs, you also press return.

  • So that is going ?deep? from the album to the artist and from the artist to the songs, and with carrots or shift-6 on my keyboard you go up to the parent from the song to the albums, and from the albums to the artists. So the next thing we can see is the playlists, so on the left you have the database, and on the right I will put the playlist. So for now there is nothing to listen to, and I will add things in these lists, so we can add either artists, albums or individual songs, so let's add one of my favorite songs, ?So equals? from Pink Floyd. So you can add it to the playlist, or add it immediately stop playing it, so this time I want to immediately play it, so I press P for play.

  • And then I will press the carrot to go back to the artists and add some more music, I will add an album by Dire Straits. So if I press P now it will add all the album and also start with the first song, but because I don't want to interrupt ?ecos? I will just press a to add all the songs from this album. What we want to do now is manipulate the playlists, so for now ?ecos? has started playing and I can modify the playlist to decide what will be next, so by default it's Sultans of Swing, but I can change that for prioritization for example.

  • Like that, so I can move one song, I can also mark multiple songs and move them around.

  • It's also possible to play the next song and the previous song so you have M-n to play the next. And M-p to play the previous one. If you wanted to delete a few songs from your album you can select them and then press k for deletion, and then they are removed from the database, not from the database, but only from the playlists. With t you can toggle the mark, so if I want to select everything by ?except ...? I can just press t. And t again to ??, if I want to select everything I can always press t when nothing is marked, so I can erase everything at once.

  • Something I can do now is display some information about the currently played song, so I can press v wherever I am to get the list of songs. It's very important to notice that whatever view you are in the shortcuts are always the same, so if I go back to the navigator with n, I can press ?? information about the current song, so v here, which ?? about the current song. So you see that there is the time, and the album and artist and ?? status, so if I pause the music, it ?? pause. And backplaying. I can move forward and move backward with M-s and M-v, I can do that slowly or fast with different shortcuts, and from the current song you can press carrots to go to the parents, so it's exactly the same shortcut as how we were navigating from the songs to the albums and from the albums to the artists, so it's carrots, and you go from the song to its album and then from the album to the artist.

  • I tried when designing the shortcuts to make the keybindings do always the same thing wherever you are, so if I press M-f now I will fast-forward the current song, so the same shortcuts work the same everywhere. And if I press ?....? Another way to control the current playlists or stop playlists is to use the Ivy based interface so it doesn't pop up any buffer, but you can still navigate your database and select the songs to play. So if I start the interface I get the list of all my artists in the minibuffer, so I can choose for example MCC artists and the ?? ?king? and the song I will pick this one for example, and there are many things I can do from here, so I can add to the current playlist I can start playing immediately, I can start and stop playlists, so let's see I just p for playing it immediately.

  • So MPDel is mostly based on tabulated lists, which I really liked. And after I implemented MPDel, I liked that kind of view so much I decided to use the views for other kinds of packages, so I implemented a database navigator, and also a network manager client using tabulated lists, and I realized that all of those libraries and tools they were sharing the same kind of code. So I decided to abstract away from all of those and I created navigel which makes it very easy to implement tabulated lists if you have a model of your domain data that you want to navigate.

  • There is a lightening talk at EmacsConf about navigel so I encourage you to have a look at it if you're interested in how I reimplemented MPDel so that it's much simpler, and how I implemented all the other packages. This is the end of my talk, I hope you liked it. And happy EmacsConf.