Emacs as a perl IDE

[Steve Mynott]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 10:17:11PM +0000, Dave Hodgkinson typed:

> Pulled together some links and thoughts, and actually learned stuff:
> 
> http://www.davehodgkinson.com/blog/2012/01/using-emacs-as-an-ide/

The main thing I didn't get for years is that emacs out of the tarball
with its defaults is fairly rubbish (although xemacs is better).

However once you've invested a bit of time in a decent .emacs
it's great for software development since everything can be in a 
buffer.

The key sequence I wish I knew earlier is M-/ which completes 
text in a current buffer against other buffers.  Saves greatly
on typing variable names and the like.

I'd at least recommend the following for  23.3.x although some may be
cargo cult and set as default now (I've found maintaining .emacs over
major upgrades a PITA).

(setq-default inhibit-startup-message t)
(fset 'yes-or-no-p 'y-or-n-p)
(global-font-lock-mode 1)
(which-func-mode)
(defalias 'perl-mode 'cperl-mode)

;; Show marked text
(setq transient-mark-mode '1)

;; Show empty lines at the end of the buffer
(setq default-indicate-empty-lines t)

;; enable this to get rid of those silly underscores
(setq cperl-invalid-face nil)

(fset 'BP
      "#!/usr/bin/perl\n\nuse strict;\nuse warnings;\n"
	  )
;; M-x BP now inserts boiler plate

(xterm-mouse-mode t)
;; allows some mouse use in a xterm/putty session

;; turn off colours in vc view mode - I can't read against a dark bg
(setq log-view-mode-hook '(lambda () (font-lock-mode 0)))

>From third party elisp I'd recommend Emacs/W3 as a browser,

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/AutoComplete

sunrise-commander.el

moccur.el - like M-x occur but works on *all* open buffers

fic-mode.el - hightlights TODO XXX etc like vim

But I still miss vim's . since C-x-( (or whatever the hell it is) is a PITA

-- 
Steve Mynott <steve at gruntling.com>