Two days ago, I felt the need to reevaluate my options for an Erlang text editor or an IDE. I have been using
aquamacs (the mac-ified emacs) for a couple of months now. It has a steep learning curve, but looks reasonably well on the mac (yes, that matters for me, and therefore I try to avoid Java desktop apps) and it provides good Erlang integration. And everything can be customized, in elisp, a LISP dialect. That is what I did not like. I would prefer to customize things in Erlang itself.
So what are the other options ? Beside of of emacs, a
vim hack and Java IDEs (
erlide,
ErlyBird) there are no other open source options I am aware of. So I investigated about proprietary solutions and it turned there is one with decent Erlang support:
Textmate. That was a pleasant experience, quickly downloaded and installed and it looks great. Textmate ships without Erlang support, but it's very easy to install the Erlang bundle, I just had to install and run
GetBundle, a helper app to browse and install additional language bundles.
The support for Erlang is not that much yet:
- Syntax highlighting
- Code snippets
There is also a language bundle for Makefiles, but it seems to simplify only running
make without arguments, therefore it is not very useful. The most interesting part, which I haven't explored yet are custom scripts accessible via user-defined key-binding, which can take current file or text selection as input, process it and overwrite the input with the result. Those scripts can be in any scripting language, so it should work with with Erlang
escripts. Will experiment with this ...
There exists also a windows editor called
E-TextEditor, which is language bundle compatible
with TextMate.
1 comment:
When it comes to coding in TextMate you may also find snippets (if my memory serves me right, that's how they are called) very useful.
E.g. when you're used to adding author tags in your
documents you can define a snippet triggered
by typing
me<-tab-> which can in turn expand to
-author("Roberto Saccon").
saves time :)
TextMate is really good when it comes to coding.
In my opinion it's superior to any other editor.
You may also find this book useful:
Textmate: Power editing for Mac
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