The Fugue

Counterpoint by Hans Fugal

The secret island of emacs howtos

Posted by Hans Fugal Sun, 29 Jun 2008 01:24:37 GMT

Word on the street is emacs is teh hotness for lisp hacking. I'm taking a serious look at clojure, which is a lisp that incorporates a lot of what I like about erlang and runs on the JVM. So naturally, I want to see if emacs is all that hype.

I'm having a problem though. I can't find the secret island of emacs howtos, where someone has written a nice one-page article on how to do clojure (or any lisp) hacking in emacs and take advantage of the most awesome good parts. I realize that covering all the cool things would probably take a few hundred pages. I don't have time to learn all the cool things anyway. I just need the most cool things. The gateway drugs if you will.

In specific, I'm looking for:

  1. Syntax highlighting
  2. Automatic indentation
  3. Paren matching
  4. Have a REPL window
  5. Evaluate this thing under the cursor

And it should all be automatic. I shouldn't have to remember and type 80 characters. The syntax highlighting/indentation should be automagic, and the REPL should be a few memorable keystrokes or in a menu (I don't want to type M-X up up down down left right left right B A every time I want a REPL).

I'll bake a loaf of sourdough for anyone that writes an article for the emacs+clojure newbie.

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  1. Levi
    about 3 hours later:

    I'll investigate this if you don't get any other responses, but not tonight.

  2. Noah Tye
    about 19 hours later:

    Put these into your .emacs file:

    ; paren matching: (show-paren-mode 1) ; syntax hilighting: (global-font-lock-mode 1)

    Emacs+Lisp is usually handled with SLIME, but I don't know if that works with Clojure (it's not listed on the SLIME page).

  3. Noah Tye
    about 19 hours later:

    Suppose I should have used the preview button:

    ; paren matching:
    (show-paren-mode 1)
    ; syntax hilighting:
    (global-font-lock-mode 1)

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