FourX: Settng Up Elixir and Neovim

Introduction

Lately, I've been exploring web technologies and bought a new camera. Naturally I thought of revisiting an old web project, dorb, that helped me learn some WASM. It's a website that allows users to upload multiple photos, add frames to them, and download the results as a zip file. However, it was slow and I wasn't happy with the results.

Enter Phoenix LiveView: a framework I chanced upon - it uses web sockets, and leverages on Elixir's concurrency and fault-tolerance. I thought, "Wow, this is exactly what I need!" dorb's successor will be "Bordro", whose name is inspired by my first camera - the Sigma DP2 Quattro.

As much as I wish to jump straight into Bordro, I'm taking it slow to familiarise myself with new concepts in Elixir, especially those about concurrency and functional programming. Hence, I'm kicking off my Elixir journey with FourX: the Connect 4 game with a twist!

Join me as I embark on this exciting adventure!

Setup

Let's start off with a not-so-exciting part: the setup. I thought it'd be as trivial as just installing elixir and erlang, but I couldn't be further from the truth.

Neovim

Setting up the LSP was pretty straightforward, I used nextls because lexical was giving me a lot of trouble. Unfortunately, I took longer than I'd have liked to get Treesitters's syntax highlighting working. I had to run :TSEnable highlight manually every time I opened a file. Upon running :TSModuleInfo, I realised that Treesitter wasn't enabled for all of the file types. The fix was moving opts to the config function:

config = function()
    require("nvim-treesitter.configs").setup({
        ensure_installed = { ..., "elixir", "erlang" },
        ...
    })
end

.config/nvim/lua/plugins/treesitter.lua

mise

I decided to try mise because Void's version of erlang wasn't up to date. However, I was faced with errors right off the bat. automake and autoconf were missing and caused errors which were fixed simply by installing the packages. I was told no curses library was available, but xbps-query -Rs curses showed that I had ncurses installed, but apparently not ncurses-devel... Okay, this took a while but it was resolved easily.

WxWidgets

mix and iex ran just fine, but I couldn't run the really cool process monitor :observer! This was where things got messy.

def application do
[
    extra_applications: [:logger, :observer, :wx],
    mod: {Fourx.Application, []}
]
end

mix.exs

Adding :observer and :wx, the GUI library that's used spawned a few errors. WxWidgets wasn't configured properly. mise uses kerl to build erlang, and it couldn't find wx-config even though I had the relevant packages installed, because they were named wx-config-gtk3 on my system. Using a simpe alias didn't work, I had to set the environment variable:

KERL_CONFIGURE_OPTIONS="--enable-wx --with-wx-config=/bin/wx-config-gtk3"

This magic line saved me from my misery.

Disabled Features

A few other features were disabled during the installation because of missing packages again. Just like the ncurses error, I had to install the relevant *-devel packages for openssl, libepoxy (OpenGL), unixodbc, and WxWidgets

Conclusion

The setup took a while, but now I'm all ready to actually start work, haha!