5.5 The Preset Data Structure and Programatically Creating Sessions ¶

p-search supports creating sessions from data, as opposed to being manually created by users. Preset plists are the data structures that support this functionality. It should be possible to reproduce any p-search session with a preset plist. A preset plist is defined by the following structure:

• :candidate-generator generator-obj-symbol :args arg-alist You can reproduce a candidate generator with a plist containing the two key-value pairs with :candidate-generator and :args. The candidate generator should be the variable which the candidate generator is bound to and the arg-alist should be all the input/option arguments (you’re only required to define items in the input-spec that don’t have defaults).
• :candidate-mapping mapping-obj-sym :args arg-alist Similar to candidate generators, you can define a mapping with the keys :candidate-mapping and :args.
• :prior-template template-obj-sym :args arg-list Again, similar to the other two types, you can define a prior preset with the keys :prior-template and :args.
• :group list-of-preset-elts You can define a preset with more than one element using the :group key with a value of a list of preset items, as defined here.

The following is an example of a preset plist with multiple items in it.

(:group ((:candidate-generator p-search-candidate-generator-filesystem :args ((base-directory . "/Users/zacharyromero/dev/emacs/emacs/") (filename-regexp . ".*") (search-tool . :rg) (use-git-ignore . on)))
         (:prior-template p-search-prior-query :args ((query-string . "list") (importance . medium)))
         (:prior-template p-search-prior-query :args ((query-string . "cons") (importance . medium)))
         (:prior-template p-search-prior-git-author :args ((git-author . Richard\ M.\ Stallman) (importance . medium)))
         (:prior-template p-search-prior-name :args ((name . ".c") (importance . medium)))))

Remember, in a p-search session you can run the command p-search-show-session-preset to view the current session as a preset plist.

Once you have the preset plist, you can pass it as the first argument to the p-search-setup-buffer function to create a session with that preset. You can also set the variable p-search-default-command-behavior to a preset to configure p-search to create a session of your choosing (see Starting a session).

Function: p-search-setup-buffer &optional preset-plist ¶

Start a p-search session. If a preset plist is provided, the session will be created with the preset instantiated.