Recently, I've discovered myself spending more & more time in Emacs.
This post is really about why that's the case, and how I have Emacs configured, in case it's of interest or use to someone else.
I used to use Emacs a long time ago - back when Perl & C were my primary languages, and dinosaurs still walked the Earth. I largely stopped around 2000, when I started writing a certain amount of Java, and using Eclipse as a primary environment.
These days, I find myself doing a fair amount of work with the OpenJDK codebase. This is a particular pain to write in an IDE. This is because to work properly, the IDE needs to hook a working version of the platform & fully support all of its features.
Now, if I'm working on the platform itself, then that self-consistency and support is not present. So I'm going to get, at best, a bunch of failures around the new features.
So a lot of the typical reasons why IDEs are useful are absent - so basic syntax highlighting is pretty much all we can hope for, and Emacs has pretty good support for that.
In terms of application code, whenever possible I like to write Clojure. These days, there is excellent support in Emacs for Clojure, including the NREPL for a very nice interactive environment.
To get clojure-mode installed, follow the instructions from here. However, the sections about inferior-lisp-mode and slime are obsolete - you should use NREPL instead.
I'm also tending to write articles & other documents in Markdown, which doesn't really need much in the way of WYSIWYG support (although I spent a tiny amount of money on Marked.app for the times when I do want to see what my .md files look like, or export to PDF).
My primary machine is a MacBook Pro, so I use the Emacs from here. I tend not to use package managers for OS X, so I don't use brew or macports.
Finally, I've been pleasantly surprised by many aspects of the modern Emacs experience. The Clojure integration has come a long way & it's now a joy to use. For OpenJDK development, it's almost as good as a full IDE.
However, there are still some rough edges. For example, Emacs doesn't ship with a spellchecker by default, and I have so far been unable to get one working - which is a medium-sized pain when writing Markdown. Instructions on how to get it working in comments would be very welcome.
This post is really about why that's the case, and how I have Emacs configured, in case it's of interest or use to someone else.
I used to use Emacs a long time ago - back when Perl & C were my primary languages, and dinosaurs still walked the Earth. I largely stopped around 2000, when I started writing a certain amount of Java, and using Eclipse as a primary environment.
These days, I find myself doing a fair amount of work with the OpenJDK codebase. This is a particular pain to write in an IDE. This is because to work properly, the IDE needs to hook a working version of the platform & fully support all of its features.
Now, if I'm working on the platform itself, then that self-consistency and support is not present. So I'm going to get, at best, a bunch of failures around the new features.
So a lot of the typical reasons why IDEs are useful are absent - so basic syntax highlighting is pretty much all we can hope for, and Emacs has pretty good support for that.
In terms of application code, whenever possible I like to write Clojure. These days, there is excellent support in Emacs for Clojure, including the NREPL for a very nice interactive environment.
To get clojure-mode installed, follow the instructions from here. However, the sections about inferior-lisp-mode and slime are obsolete - you should use NREPL instead.
I'm also tending to write articles & other documents in Markdown, which doesn't really need much in the way of WYSIWYG support (although I spent a tiny amount of money on Marked.app for the times when I do want to see what my .md files look like, or export to PDF).
My primary machine is a MacBook Pro, so I use the Emacs from here. I tend not to use package managers for OS X, so I don't use brew or macports.
Finally, I've been pleasantly surprised by many aspects of the modern Emacs experience. The Clojure integration has come a long way & it's now a joy to use. For OpenJDK development, it's almost as good as a full IDE.
However, there are still some rough edges. For example, Emacs doesn't ship with a spellchecker by default, and I have so far been unable to get one working - which is a medium-sized pain when writing Markdown. Instructions on how to get it working in comments would be very welcome.
1 comment:
How does your version of emacs compare to http://aquamacs.org ?
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