Re: Issues with emacs

[Tom]

Richard Riley <rileyrg <at> gmail.com> writes:

> >
> > Does emacs REALLY need MORE features!?  It's already so complex, now,
> > as to seem almost unfathomable to many.  What emacs needs is some
> 
> are features supported out of the box by other top end editors : proper
> syntax/semantic based completion and code navigation that works "out of
> the box" (cedet one day I hope), mixed mode editing (a must despite many
> purists sneering at it)and decent java support to the level of eclipse.
> 

There is a discussion of an article on Reddit on Java development in Emacs
vs. IntelliJ IDEA. The article is a bit misguided (doesn't know about
etags), but in the comments there are some useful comparisons.

For example:

   I haven't used ctags in a few years, but it would have to improve
   significantly for me to want to switch back. It's hard to compare
   the two once you've used IntelliJ on a large project for a while.
   
   - The Parsing was very basic (a glorified regex?) in ctags. It
     had limited-to-no knowledge of the context of a variable, and I
     don't rememeber it being useful for much other than global
     names. A variable that is private to a class or package
     hierarchy, and given a name that is used in many other classes
     of the project (like "id") can still be navigated-to or renamed
     instantly and safely.
   
   - Support for embedding languages inside others. Javascript
     inside HTML? SQL inside Java? CSS inside HTML inside a template
     language? You can still use navigation, completion and
     refactoring. IntelliJ supports a bunch of (templating,
     programming and scripting) languages and can usually embed (and
     parse) them fairly arbitrarily (You can even tell it "this java
     string contains Javascript" and it will syntax highlight, provide
     completion and (potentially) allow navigation within it.
   
   - Find Usages. You can reliably and instantly view where a
     property or class is being used. It doesn't matter if there are
     other variables of the same name in other packages, classes or
     contexts. It will also show where the variable is used in
     templates files (or "SQL" if you're using a supported ORM like
     Hibernate).

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/vqb9l/
programmer_productivity_emacs_versus_intellij_idea/


It would be nice to see similar features in emacs. The question
is why it is not happening. My guess is those who have to do
heavy Java development have moved to Eclipse/IDEA and other tools
already and those who still use Emacs for C, Lisp, orgmode, etc.
don't care about Java development or see it as wasted time to
implement such features in Emacs when other more capable tools
exist.

The problem is this decreases the overall usefulness of emacs,
because Java development is lost ground and due to lack of
motivation/resources there is no real effort to make emacs a
competitive tool again for Java development.