Wednesday, 23 October 2002
Michael McCracken writes about some great Emacs minor modes, hide/show mode and the Emacs Code Browser. I wish there was some way to collapse everything at once in hide/show mode; I'm still looking for decent automatic folding support in Emacs that doesn't require I reformat my source code. The Emacs Code Browser is really nice: it takes over an entire Emacs frame, parses your code as you type, and adjusts its context to match the file you're working in though it does limit you two edit windows per frame (in Emacs parlance, a window is a pane, and a frame is a window—confused yet?) It essentially does correctly everything Speedbar does wrong, so if you've used Speedbar and been disappointed, give ECB a try.
I had some installation troubles because of the XEmacs 21.5 beta I was using. Make sure you update to beta 9 to get package installation (sort of) working, then install the latest eieio, semantic, speedbar and c-support packages. hs-minor-mode is included in the c-support package (see hideshow.el for some sample key bindings and mode hooks, taking care to fix the 'minro' typos); ECB is not yet packaged. Note that the site-lisp directory is dead. Packages you install (say, the ECB one), put in .../lib/xemacs/site-packages/lisp. Subdirectories of this directory are automatically added to the load-path, and site-packages/lisp/site-start.el works like you'd expect.
12:39 PM
