Bucking the trend

Thu, 10 May 2007 10:08:38 +0100

Recently I've found myself coding in Erlang and C. TextMate has some minimal support for Erlang but nothing much beyond syntax highliting and a number of the denizens of #erlang recommended emacs for it's Erlang support. Since I've long wanted to get to grips with emacs this seemed like a good opportunity.

Over the last couple of weeks I've used emacs (the Aquamacs variety although I am downloading CarbonEmacs and am being persuaded to just hunker down and use gnu emacs from the shell) and, at least for basic editing, am beginning to feel somewhat comfortable.

The thing I really miss, above all else, is the project drawer. At the moment my C and Erlang code is all living in a couple of folders and, at any one time, I probably don't switch folders often. In short, C-x C-f is usually good enough.

However, when I tried to use emacs with one of my Rails projects last night I fell apart and was back in TextMate inside of 10 minutes. Rails projects tend to nest folders quite heavily and, lacking a good visual imagination, I don't keep that hierarchy in my head. I tend to lean quite heavily on the project navigator and Cmd+T. Trying to open the files I wanted in emacs quickly became very frustrating indeed.

I've had suggestions for speedbar.el and toggle.el which I am going to check out. I've also been looking around for other people making (or contemplating) the switch from TextMate to emacs. Seems like I am bucking the trend though and only finding people going the other way around.

Curiouser and Curiouser! on textmate

Bucking the trend