I’m trying to get flyspell-mode working in emacs on bluefin. Unfortunately since aspell is provided by linuxbrew and emacs is provided by flatpak, the system is having difficulty locating the dictionaries. I don’t know the right elisp or whatever to force emacs to find the dictionaries where they are installed in /home/linuxbrew. Does anyone have any idea?
Drew
It might work better if you install emacs from brew then. Version 29.4 is available in brew.
Hmm. Will that give me a graphical emacs or console only? I have it installed already but it only seems to be the console version.
Drew
Just the console version.
OK. Yeah that works but I want the GUI version. I’ll post here if I find a solution.
You can also install graphical applications in a distrobox and export them.
Here is a copr repo with the pgtk-nativecomp build zelezarof/emacs-pgtk-nativecomp Copr
Seems to be a known issue in the flatpak version.
Evidently the flatpak runtime included with the org.gnu.emacs package does not have any languages and there does not seem to be an easy way to add them.
I think I’ll go with the distrobox-export approach. Not ideal but I already have a few apps exported from Ubuntu that are only available on that distro. If the flatpak gets updated at some point I’ll switch back.
Why is distrobox approach not ideal? In practice should come to same thing? Yes you need to install all the other tooling in distrobox also and it limits ‘multi container’ usage I guess. Any other issues with it?
Not there myself yet, right now on arch but I’m planning to move to Bluefin so lurking here. Emacs is my main software 
Probably I’m also fine with terminal only tbh so that might be good enough…
I use Emacs from a arch container and distrobox-export to my home dir. Works fine.
Hi @Igor_Lautar
My comment was probably an overstatement. It definitely works and is well within the model of distrobox. But the purist in me wants to stick with Flatpak apps when possible just due to the extra maintenance needed for my customized distrobox config.
Drew
just throwing this out there - I’ve had success with a debian container and installing the guix package manager on top of that. was able to install emacs from there and export it from distrobox as app. Only sticking point is sometimes the export works and sometimes it doesn’t based on where the guix package manager looks for the shell profile directory.
Ah, got it, thx all. I plan to use arch container (it has all stuff including native-comp pgtk).
You can give the flatpak access to the Linuxbrew directory.
Someone was asking about emacs in chat and since this is the closest we have to an emacs thread:
Someone could make a good sysext with all the goodies. Then it could just get bolted on to bluefin and it’d behave more like a traditional installation would. If someone investigates that and it works we could just tell people to use that.
This looks really elegant solution, ‘lighter’ version of custom container.
From reading it quickly, you can layer multiple sysexts on base image?
Why not bake Emacs and everything else into your own OCI image with https://blue-build.org?
That is very interesting to me. I was unaware of that project and I am definitely interested in developing my own custom images to support my Embedded development use cases. I will definitely play with that.
I’m not familiar with sysexts and how they play here so I cannot comment on that in depth but a quick search makes it sound very intriguing as well. I probably won’t have a chance to investigate in depth but am happy to help test and experiment if others have anything concrete.
Drew
It’s really easy! The Blue Build team is doing an insanely good job. Here’s an invite to their Discord server: BlueBuild
Feel free to take a look at my BlueBuild configuration: GitHub - cig0/bluebuild: My personal Fedora Atomic Desktop images
It might (will!) be outdated since I switched to NixOS at the beginning of the year and haven’t kept them updated. I try to follow Universal Blue and Fedora’s development, but I’m a little behind, and you might need to adjust some nuts and bolts here and there.
I will have free time this Wednesday and possibly Thursday; send me a PM if you want to hang out and work on a template that suits your needs.
Cheers!