Re: Emacs learning curve

[David Engster]

Eric M. Ludlam writes:
> I had responded to a couple different assertions.  One was something
> David Kastrup wrote:
>
> | The question is why the respective facilities are not part of the
> | generic Emacs language support framework.  Support for every language
> | has a completely disjoint set of features, keybindings, highlighting,
> | and so on of wildly differing quality, design and usability.
>
> My response was meant that CEDET is not a C/C++ only feature, but an
> infrastructure under which a mode can support code completion and the
> like.  CEDET doesn't tackle keybindings or font lock since Emacs
> already does that.  However, a suite of minor modes based on the
> infrastructure of CEDET can provide features (like code completion)
> which a mode author then does not need to implement themselves if a
> grammar is supplied.

Maybe I can give a small example for this, though it's more of a
shameless plug.

I've extended the Minimap package to include information from the
Semantic parser. See the first screenshot at

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MiniMap

You'll see on the left that certain areas have a dark gray background,
which correspond to Semantic tags. Those areas have an overlay in the
middle with their name, in the font lock color for the class
(function/variable/type).

The code which does that is maybe 20 lines and almost trivial. It should
work with every mode which is supported by CEDET.

All one needs to know to access Semantic information is in the "Semantic
Application Development" manual; I don't know this is included in Emacs,
though.

-David