4 ms·

Can your emacs editor construct hyperlinked call graphs showing all callers and callees of a given function? Will this call graph generation remain up to date a

by sreque 17y ago

Can your emacs editor construct hyperlinked call graphs showing all callers and callees of a given function? Will this call graph generation remain up to date as I edit files? Can Emacs give me a hyper-linked list of all usages of a given symbol and do it properly(lexical scope, etc.), not just doing a simple symbol search? Can I edit my code in emacs, have a background compiler compile the file on the fly, and also provide error feedback, hilighting the problem lines with a tagged failure reason and also providing a hyper-linked list in another window as well? Last I checked, the best I could do would be to kick off a compile manually and navigate the errors as a linked list. How's emacs' refactoring support? Judging by the following stackoverflow post, it's pretty poor: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/673554/how-can-i-refactor-c-source-code-using-emacs http://stackoverflow.com/questions/673554/how-can-i-refactor.... How's Emacs' keyword completion? Last I checked, it was just a hacky dictionary look-up, whereas an IDE can semantically analyze the source to provide intelligent suggestions. Even if you can get Vim or Emacs to do some of the above, it usually isn't as easy to use or as useful as an IDE. For instance, I know you can get call graph support in Vim using cctree.vim, but it relies on cscope, which requires refreshing the database manually, is slow to load, and tends to generate incomplete tag sets. IDE's are, well, better integrated, and so can do many things a lot better than looser environments like Emacs and Vim. Their UI's tend to be a lot more powerful because they are not designed to be run on windowless environments. Personally, for small projects I use Vim and for large projects I use an IDE with a Vim emulation plugin like Netbean's JVI plugin.

deleted 17y ago
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lutorm 17y ago
Emacs can do whatever you want. If it doesn't, it can be added. In fact, Emacs is an IDE... It's just not a mouse-based IDE. Mouse clicking makes my hands hurt much faster than using the keyboard. I also find it annoying to switch from mouse<->keyboard, so I don't want a UI that relies on constant mousing.
- RyanDScott 17y ago
  "Emacs can do whatever you want. If it doesn't, it can be added...." Um no. But if so, then someone better start busting a lisp to get emacs to make cute little bubbles. I'd love to see that.
  - lutorm 17y ago
    They'd just be text-based little bubbles...
- doty 17y ago
  "Emacs can do whatever you want." Saying "Emacs can do whatever you want" is like saying "your computer can do anything you want." Sure it can, so long as you're willing to write the code to make it go. But my time is finite; I cannot be bothered to re-build environments that have already been implemented elsewhere.
  - sjs 17y ago
    In the 30+ years Emacs has been around people have written a huge amount of Emacs Lisp that does pretty much everything you can think of. Almost every feature from other editors and IDEs has been implemented in Emacs. I like Lisp but rarely write very much Emacs Lisp, and when I do it's usually an extension of some code someone else started. There aren't a lot of new ideas and when an Emacs user sees one he implements it for Emacs.
    - doty 17y ago
      You may say this, but I don't see semantic member or statement completion for any language. I don't see "go to definition" or "find all references." Frankly, although cc-mode is fantastic for indentation and stuff, it offers a small fraction of the features of Eclipse or NetBeans. Yes, I've used ctags and I've used etags. They tend to be interesting approximations but are never 100% reliable. They don't do a deep sematic analysis of my program. (For example, they don't understand C macros.) They don't update as I type. The closest I've ever seen has been the "Semantic Bovinator" thingy. I have never managed to get it to run, nor has anybody I've seen try. You experience may be different, of course. (I realize that by posting this I'm inviting a raft of people to post and say "It works for me!" :) )
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geocar 17y ago
> Can your emacs editor construct hyperlinked call graphs showing all callers and callees of a given function? Will this call graph generation remain up to date as I edit files? Yes. You're looking for Cedet. Can your IDE read my mail? > Can Emacs give me a hyper-linked list of all usages of a given symbol and do it properly(lexical scope, etc.), not just doing a simple symbol search? Yes. You're looking for Cedet. Can your IDE integrate with your calendar? > Can I edit my code in emacs, have a background compiler compile the file on the fly, and also provide error feedback, hilighting the problem lines Yes. You're looking for `flymake-mode`. Can your IDE email who created the error using version control information? > How's emacs' refactoring support? Judging by the following stackoverflow post Stackoverflow gives retarded answers sometimes. The next best suggestion on that page is correct. Cedet is great. > How's Emacs' keyword completion? It's fine. You can complete symbols sensitively, and complete filenames or email addresses from anywhere. Having multiple completion systems is very useful. How's your IDE's ability to complete those things? > Even if you can get Vim or Emacs to do some of the above, it usually isn't as easy to use or as useful as an IDE. You don't need to be so hostile. Emacs does these things just fine, and has for a long time. Emacs also does my time tracking, outlining, and email. Your IDE won't do any of those things, and you don't expect it to because you think those tasks are best left to other parts of your operating system. The thing you're missing is that for Emacs users, Emacs is the operating system. I dual boot into Firefox sometimes.
- sreque 17y ago
  I apologize if people thought I was hostile. I thought I was just making an argument by pointing out several examples of things text editors like Emacs don't normally do that IDE's do well. You've proven me wrong, at least for the case of C/C++. I would still argue that Emacs itself is not an IDE. It's just an editor with a turing-complete scripting engine. However, you could definitely convince me that Emacs+CEDET is an IDE, and I'm glad you pointed it out for me. I would be interested in seeing similar environments for C#/Java as well as for dynamic languages like ruby/python/php, which IDEs have also been handling very well lately. I've also noticed in general that it's difficult to make an IDE for c/c++ that works better than editors. They compile slowly, The macro system severely complicates quick parsing, C++'s grammar in particular is very difficult to parse and analyze, the languages do not make run-time loading of code easy, and they don't provide much in the way of RTTI. In short, they are not very IDE-friendly languages. Java and C# are the perfect IDE languages, and dynamic languages suffer from not providing enough static information.
angusgr 17y ago
Wow what what a rant. - I think that different languages (and programmers) suit themselves to different balances of the IDE/Editor combination. I agree with your post, inasmuch as I find writing Java outside of an IDE like Eclipse limits you greatly. It sounds like you write Java a lot. - OTOH, I find writing C/C++ in Emacs with cscope/etags/make support and some custom keystrokes, and functions for common Unix calls, is about as good as any IDE can get you for those languages (although I admit that I've only had limited C++ IDE experience, using Visual Studio.) Yes, you have to do custom configuring to get Emacs working well. So, it's a small amount of extra upfront work over Eclipse. The upside is that you get to customize it however you want. In Eclipse I'm still using most of the default configuration, for the simple reason that it works "well enough" I find writing Erlang in Emacs erlang-mode is fine as well, mostly because the language doesn't encourage me to create the kind of horrible architectural behemoths that you _need_ an IDE to manage. The difference between Language-oriented and IDE-oriented approaches to programming was laid out really well in a recent blog post that made it to HN, but I can't find it with a quick google - sorry.
- bitdiddle 17y ago
  As an emacs user, you may find Distel very useful for Erlang. It connects to a running node and leverages the code reflection capabilities in Erlang, so you get who_calls, symbolic debugging, process listing, M-., etc..
  - angusgr 17y ago
    Yeah, Distel's one of those things I keep bragging about to my vi-using coworkers, and have yet to actually try out myself. ;). Thanks for the tip.
jrockway 17y ago
geocar's response is pretty good, but I am going to disagree on some points. Hyperlinked call graphs: nope. Never needed it, don't know how to generate them for any language I use. Emacs can't do it, but neither can anything else. Write the code to do the work, and Emacs will support it in about 30 seconds. All use of a given symbol: same problem. The static analysis for this is Really Hard, and it would provide me with near-zero value. Background compilation: yup. Supported by pretty much every mode. Refactoring: I've used Eclipse, but I've never had good luck with its refactoring tools. The automated refactorings are almost what I want, but since exactly what I want is so simple, I just do it manually. If you are renaming your classes everyday and you have to change the name in 1000 files, you have two problems that can't be solved by an IDE. Keyword completion: excellent. I was using Eclipse today, and there is a noticeable delay between when I press M-/ and when the keyword was completed. I eventually learned to not use that feature, because I can type faster than the auto-completion can "intelligently select" the right keyword. Emacs is instantaneous, and right as often as anything else. And I can expand things other than symbols, like long words in the documentation, or filenames in string literals, etc. As for integration, I find Emacs to be quite well integrated for the work I do. A few weeks ago, I was writing a Haskell app for use on Windows. I was really not looking forward to it, until I realized that all the Haskell functionality works perfectly on Windows. I never needed to leave Emacs; I could test my code (interactively or automatically) from the GHCi REPL and I could build binaries and docs with M-x compile. Of course, it's just one keystroke to move to compilation errors (in both cases). If I needed to poke around in a shell, I just used Eshell, which works the same on every platform. Everything you need to do is tightly integrated and very fast. Working with Perl is just as nice; one keystroke runs the test suite in a nearby eshell, another just runs the tests that pertain to the current file. Anything I want to do is usually one or two keys away, and a shell to do something complicated is just as easy to get to. (For me, C-x C-x switches between the shell and the most-recently-used buffer. Fast!) Their UI's tend to be a lot more powerful because they are not designed to be run on windowless environments. Not true. But one thing that's nice about Emacs is that you can run Emacs in the background and connect to it multiple times. If your X session dies, no information is lost. If you are poking around in a shell, you just "emacsclient -t file" (which I alias to "ec file") and you are instantly working with that file in your normal Emacs session. for large projects I use an IDE with a Vim emulation plugin That means you are probably unaware of about 90% of Vim's features. I've watched many experienced Vim users try to use various vi emulation plugins for Eclipse, and there is always a lot of cursing involved. They eventually just invoke Eclipse functions from vim instead. The underlying theme here is that IDEs make tasks that you perform once or twice a week really simple. The "traditional editors" don't do much about that; instead they make the things you do 10,000 times a day really really simple. (One other thing I notice is that IDE users tend to ignore features that Vim and Emacs have and dismiss them as unnecessary, while Emacs/Vim users steal the good features from IDEs as often as possible.) In conclusion, you don't know much about Emacs.

by sreque 17y ago

deleted 17y ago

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lutorm 17y ago

Emacs can do whatever you want. If it doesn't, it can be added. In fact, Emacs is an IDE... It's just not a mouse-based IDE. Mouse clicking makes my hands hurt much faster than using the keyboard. I also find it annoying to switch from mouse<->keyboard, so I don't want a UI that relies on constant mousing.

RyanDScott 17y ago
"Emacs can do whatever you want. If it doesn't, it can be added...." Um no. But if so, then someone better start busting a lisp to get emacs to make cute little bubbles. I'd love to see that.
- lutorm 17y ago
  They'd just be text-based little bubbles...
doty 17y ago
"Emacs can do whatever you want." Saying "Emacs can do whatever you want" is like saying "your computer can do anything you want." Sure it can, so long as you're willing to write the code to make it go. But my time is finite; I cannot be bothered to re-build environments that have already been implemented elsewhere.
- sjs 17y ago
  In the 30+ years Emacs has been around people have written a huge amount of Emacs Lisp that does pretty much everything you can think of. Almost every feature from other editors and IDEs has been implemented in Emacs. I like Lisp but rarely write very much Emacs Lisp, and when I do it's usually an extension of some code someone else started. There aren't a lot of new ideas and when an Emacs user sees one he implements it for Emacs.
  - doty 17y ago
    You may say this, but I don't see semantic member or statement completion for any language. I don't see "go to definition" or "find all references." Frankly, although cc-mode is fantastic for indentation and stuff, it offers a small fraction of the features of Eclipse or NetBeans. Yes, I've used ctags and I've used etags. They tend to be interesting approximations but are never 100% reliable. They don't do a deep sematic analysis of my program. (For example, they don't understand C macros.) They don't update as I type. The closest I've ever seen has been the "Semantic Bovinator" thingy. I have never managed to get it to run, nor has anybody I've seen try. You experience may be different, of course. (I realize that by posting this I'm inviting a raft of people to post and say "It works for me!" :) )

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

geocar 17y ago

> Can your emacs editor construct hyperlinked call graphs showing all callers and callees of a given function? Will this call graph generation remain up to date as I edit files? Yes. You're looking for Cedet. Can your IDE read my mail? > Can Emacs give me a hyper-linked list of all usages of a given symbol and do it properly(lexical scope, etc.), not just doing a simple symbol search? Yes. You're looking for Cedet. Can your IDE integrate with your calendar? > Can I edit my code in emacs, have a background compiler compile the file on the fly, and also provide error feedback, hilighting the problem lines Yes. You're looking for `flymake-mode`. Can your IDE email who created the error using version control information? > How's emacs' refactoring support? Judging by the following stackoverflow post Stackoverflow gives retarded answers sometimes. The next best suggestion on that page is correct. Cedet is great. > How's Emacs' keyword completion? It's fine. You can complete symbols sensitively, and complete filenames or email addresses from anywhere. Having multiple completion systems is very useful. How's your IDE's ability to complete those things? > Even if you can get Vim or Emacs to do some of the above, it usually isn't as easy to use or as useful as an IDE. You don't need to be so hostile. Emacs does these things just fine, and has for a long time. Emacs also does my time tracking, outlining, and email. Your IDE won't do any of those things, and you don't expect it to because you think those tasks are best left to other parts of your operating system. The thing you're missing is that for Emacs users, Emacs is the operating system. I dual boot into Firefox sometimes.

sreque 17y ago
I apologize if people thought I was hostile. I thought I was just making an argument by pointing out several examples of things text editors like Emacs don't normally do that IDE's do well. You've proven me wrong, at least for the case of C/C++. I would still argue that Emacs itself is not an IDE. It's just an editor with a turing-complete scripting engine. However, you could definitely convince me that Emacs+CEDET is an IDE, and I'm glad you pointed it out for me. I would be interested in seeing similar environments for C#/Java as well as for dynamic languages like ruby/python/php, which IDEs have also been handling very well lately. I've also noticed in general that it's difficult to make an IDE for c/c++ that works better than editors. They compile slowly, The macro system severely complicates quick parsing, C++'s grammar in particular is very difficult to parse and analyze, the languages do not make run-time loading of code easy, and they don't provide much in the way of RTTI. In short, they are not very IDE-friendly languages. Java and C# are the perfect IDE languages, and dynamic languages suffer from not providing enough static information.

angusgr 17y ago

Wow what what a rant. - I think that different languages (and programmers) suit themselves to different balances of the IDE/Editor combination. I agree with your post, inasmuch as I find writing Java outside of an IDE like Eclipse limits you greatly. It sounds like you write Java a lot. - OTOH, I find writing C/C++ in Emacs with cscope/etags/make support and some custom keystrokes, and functions for common Unix calls, is about as good as any IDE can get you for those languages (although I admit that I've only had limited C++ IDE experience, using Visual Studio.) Yes, you have to do custom configuring to get Emacs working well. So, it's a small amount of extra upfront work over Eclipse. The upside is that you get to customize it however you want. In Eclipse I'm still using most of the default configuration, for the simple reason that it works "well enough" I find writing Erlang in Emacs erlang-mode is fine as well, mostly because the language doesn't encourage me to create the kind of horrible architectural behemoths that you _need_ an IDE to manage. The difference between Language-oriented and IDE-oriented approaches to programming was laid out really well in a recent blog post that made it to HN, but I can't find it with a quick google - sorry.

bitdiddle 17y ago
As an emacs user, you may find Distel very useful for Erlang. It connects to a running node and leverages the code reflection capabilities in Erlang, so you get who_calls, symbolic debugging, process listing, M-., etc..
- angusgr 17y ago
  Yeah, Distel's one of those things I keep bragging about to my vi-using coworkers, and have yet to actually try out myself. ;). Thanks for the tip.

jrockway 17y ago

geocar's response is pretty good, but I am going to disagree on some points. Hyperlinked call graphs: nope. Never needed it, don't know how to generate them for any language I use. Emacs can't do it, but neither can anything else. Write the code to do the work, and Emacs will support it in about 30 seconds. All use of a given symbol: same problem. The static analysis for this is Really Hard, and it would provide me with near-zero value. Background compilation: yup. Supported by pretty much every mode. Refactoring: I've used Eclipse, but I've never had good luck with its refactoring tools. The automated refactorings are almost what I want, but since exactly what I want is so simple, I just do it manually. If you are renaming your classes everyday and you have to change the name in 1000 files, you have two problems that can't be solved by an IDE. Keyword completion: excellent. I was using Eclipse today, and there is a noticeable delay between when I press M-/ and when the keyword was completed. I eventually learned to not use that feature, because I can type faster than the auto-completion can "intelligently select" the right keyword. Emacs is instantaneous, and right as often as anything else. And I can expand things other than symbols, like long words in the documentation, or filenames in string literals, etc. As for integration, I find Emacs to be quite well integrated for the work I do. A few weeks ago, I was writing a Haskell app for use on Windows. I was really not looking forward to it, until I realized that all the Haskell functionality works perfectly on Windows. I never needed to leave Emacs; I could test my code (interactively or automatically) from the GHCi REPL and I could build binaries and docs with M-x compile. Of course, it's just one keystroke to move to compilation errors (in both cases). If I needed to poke around in a shell, I just used Eshell, which works the same on every platform. Everything you need to do is tightly integrated and very fast. Working with Perl is just as nice; one keystroke runs the test suite in a nearby eshell, another just runs the tests that pertain to the current file. Anything I want to do is usually one or two keys away, and a shell to do something complicated is just as easy to get to. (For me, C-x C-x switches between the shell and the most-recently-used buffer. Fast!) Their UI's tend to be a lot more powerful because they are not designed to be run on windowless environments. Not true. But one thing that's nice about Emacs is that you can run Emacs in the background and connect to it multiple times. If your X session dies, no information is lost. If you are poking around in a shell, you just "emacsclient -t file" (which I alias to "ec file") and you are instantly working with that file in your normal Emacs session. for large projects I use an IDE with a Vim emulation plugin That means you are probably unaware of about 90% of Vim's features. I've watched many experienced Vim users try to use various vi emulation plugins for Eclipse, and there is always a lot of cursing involved. They eventually just invoke Eclipse functions from vim instead. The underlying theme here is that IDEs make tasks that you perform once or twice a week really simple. The "traditional editors" don't do much about that; instead they make the things you do 10,000 times a day really really simple. (One other thing I notice is that IDE users tend to ignore features that Vim and Emacs have and dismiss them as unnecessary, while Emacs/Vim users steal the good features from IDEs as often as possible.) In conclusion, you don't know much about Emacs.