From the first days of el-get is was quite clear for me that we would reach a point where users would want a nice listing including descriptions of the packages, and a major mode allowing you to select packages to install, remove and update. It was also quite clear that I was not much interested into doing it myself, even if I would appreciate having it done.

Well, the joy of Open Source & Free Software (pick your own poison). jglee1027 is this GitHub guy who did offer an implementation of said facility, and who added descriptions for almost all of the now 402 recipes that we have included with el-get.

Here’s an image of what you get:

The packages with no description are fetched by M-x el-get-emacswiki-refresh which will not download all emacswiki content locally just so that it can parse the scripts’s header and have a local description. Maybe it’s time to ask for another page over there like emacswiki page index but containing the first line too.

For recipes we offer, this first line often looks like the following:

;;; 123-menu.el --- Simple menuing system, reminiscent of Lotus 123 in DOS

Of course some files over there are not following the stanza, but that would be good enough already.

All in all, I hope you enjoy M-x el-get-list-packages!