Writing or extending existing emacs packages: is it worth or should I move to Netbeans/Eclipse?
- by Andrea
I'm finishing my master degree course in CS and I've almost become addicted to Emacs. I've used it to write in C, Latex, Java, JSP,XML, CommonLisp, Ada and other languages no other editor supported, like AMPL.
I'd like to improve the packages I've been using the most or create new ones, but, in practice, I find that the implementation of Emacs leaves a lot to be desired.
There are a lot of poorly-featured/poorly-maintained packages with either overlapping functionalities or obscure incompatibilities, and Elisp just seems to foster the situation by lacking the common features modern lisps have.
In contrast Eclipse and Netbeans are actively improved and it does seem they can be effective for non-mainstream languages. I tried Hibachi for Ada in Eclipse and it worked well, there's CUPS for Lisp in Eclipse and LambdaBeans built using NetBeans components.
On the other hand those plugins seem to be less active than their Emacs' counterparts, for example Hibachi was archived last year.
What's your opinion on this? Which editor should I write extension for?
EDIT: To answer Larry Coleman (see comment below):
I like Emacs as a user because it is efficient both for me and the computer I'm using. It's fast and the textual interface (i.e. minibuffer) allows for quick interaction. It's solid and packages are usually small and easy to manage. If I need to correct or remove something I usually just have to change a row in my .emacs or an elisp file, or delete a directory. Eclipse plugins rely on a more complicated process that screwed my Eclipse configuration a couple of times, forcing me to do a clean reinstall. Emacs works as long as I use the basic packages. If I need something more complicated the situation gets pretty hairy.
As a "power user" I think that the best I can hope for is to write a severely crippled version of the extensions I'd actually like to have; in other words, that it's not worth the trouble.
I'd like to write extensions for the things I'd like to have automated in Emacs, for example project support with automated tag-table update on file writing. There are a few projects on this that lack integration, documentation, extensibility and so forth. The best one is probably CEDET, for which I believe the Greenspun's 10th rule can be applied.
EDIT: To comment Larry Coleman's answer
I'm pretty sure I can pick elisp programming but the extensions I have in mind don't exist yet despite their relative simplicity and the effort more knowledgeable people poured into related projects.This makes me wonder whether it is so because of the way emacs is developed, i.e. people tend to write their own little extensions without coordination, or its implementation, its extension language not being able to keep up with the growing complexity.
