erlIDE

[Garrett Smith]

Does anyone use erlIDE for Erlang development?

How's your experience been?

http://erlide.sourceforge.net/

Garrett

[John Patton]

Awesome, a question I can (and have the time to) answer, finally. :)  

I used erlIDE all the way up until I worked with various CEUG members to help me set up Xemacs and Aquamacs. erlIDE is nice if you're familiar with eclipse already, which I was since I'm also a veteran core Java developer and have used eclipse for many years. Other than comfortable familiarity, I found that it had a lot of shortcomings with coding erlang that made me fight with it to do what I wanted rather than focus on the code. 

My professional opinion: The time you'll waste (potentially) being frustrated with it might be better used by setting up and learning how to use an emacs client with distel (or any other) erlang mode.  I have a dated blog post on this for setting it up on a Mac, but if you're using Windows or Linux, some of the information still works. I have put the links to the reference material towards the bottom of the post that will be helpful, as well:

http://contrasttomediocrity.blogspot.com/2010/05/setting-up-emacs-erlang-mode-distel-on.html

Some emacs keyboard shortcuts to get you started:

http://www.engr.uvic.ca/~dastone/emacs-keys.html

BONUS: once you learn the keyboard shortcuts, many of them work with the default readline editing mode for bash and other shells. I know a bunch of folks tend to change the default readline to "vi mode", but emacs editing on the command line is *so* nice.

I hope that helped. Erlang converted me to emacs. 

BTW, I hope to be back at the meetings, soon... been fighting with some serious personal things at home.

Cheers,

-john

[Garrett Smith]

I just played around with it on Linux at it still seems to have some
major problems (crashes Eclipse, various non-descriptive
exceptions/errors, "not implemented" features). Bummer.

I too started using Emacs because of Erlang and I've been very happy overall.

But I'm working with folks who need to start using Erlang -- and I'm
certainly not going to push them into Emacs.

Does anyone have other non-Emacs success stories with Erlang?

[stefo]

Hi Garrett

Nice to hear from you again. I call myself an Erlang beginner with no
previous Eclipse experience, just matching your target audience
profile, probably. Not much Linux experience either, what makes it
worse for Erlang projects.

I started Erlang development with erlIDE a year ago on XP 32 bit and
changed to Windows 7 64 bit in the meantime. The main reason was that
I could not force myself into remembering all the EMACS keystrokes.

I'm building a Diameter Stack in Erlang and arrived at some 30 modules
now, still a small project, involving 3 programmers all in all. The
real challanges for the IDE will come, I'm sure, but up to this point
erlIDE just worked fine. For the debugging, I use separate shells
outside of Eclipse.

There are a few bugs in erlIDE/Eclipse which make it necessary to quit
Eclipse and restart it, once a day or so (IDE loosing its Erlang
formatting capabilities and stufff like that).

But the IDE is still quick enough that this does not hurt. Real
crashes of Eclipse happened 3-4 times in one year.

SVN is working fine within erlIDE. We sucessfully used
VisualSourceSafe in the beginning too.

I will certainly stick to erlIDE for some time to go.

Have a nice spring

Stefan

[bill robertson]

On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 4:29 PM, Garrett Smith <g...@rre.tt> wrote:

But I'm working with folks who need to start using Erlang -- and I'm
certainly not going to push them into Emacs.

Emacs is not that hard for basic use.  There's a menu shortcut for the most common tasks, so if people don't care for the keystrokes, they can ignore them at first.

I suggest adding a couple lines to your .emacs file though.

(setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil)

(setq inhibit-splash-screen t) 

The first makes emacs uses spaces instead of tabs.  Which is essential if you're going to have a mixed editor environment.  The second disables the annoying 'splash' screen.

Good luck.

-Bill