Previewing SwiftUI layouts in Emacs (revisited)

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2021-06-21 12:00:06

When I say extend, I didn't quite modify ob-swift itself, but rather advised org-babel-execute:swift to modify its behavior at runtime.

Fast-forward to June 2021 and Scott Nicholes reminded me there's still interest in org babel SwiftUI support. ob-swift seems a little inactive, but no worries there. The package offers great general-purpose Swift support. On the other hand, SwiftUI previews can likely live as a single-purpose package all on its own… and so I set off to bundle the rendering functionality into a new ob-swiftui package.

Luckily, org babel's documentation has a straightforward section to help you develop support for new babel languages. They simplified things by offering template.el, which serves as the foundation for your language implementation. For the most part, it's a matter of searching, replacing strings, and removing the bits you don't need.

The elisp core of ob-swiftui is fairly simple. It expands the org block body, inserts the expanded body into a temporary buffer, and finally feeds the code to the Swift toolchain for execution.