Emacs Telling You the Kind of the Variable Under the Cursor?

Emacs Telling You the Kind of the Variable Under the Cursor?

[Lorenzo Isella]

Dear All,
The email title almost says it all.
I read in a slashdot post that you can configure Emacs so that it will 
tell you/display somewhere (there were no details in that post) the type 
of the variable under the cursor.
This sounds handy, but I have no idea how to activate this feature 
(given but not granted that it exists really).
Any hints?
Cheers

Lorenzo

Re: Emacs Telling You the Kind of the Variable Under the Cursor?

[B. T. Raven]

Lorenzo Isella wrote:
> Dear All,
> The email title almost says it all.
> I read in a slashdot post that you can configure Emacs so that it will 
> tell you/display somewhere (there were no details in that post) the type 
> of the variable under the cursor.
> This sounds handy, but I have no idea how to activate this feature 
> (given but not granted that it exists really).
> Any hints?
> Cheers
> 
> Lorenzo
> 
> 

If you have access to an emacs installation you could evaluate the 
following forms in *scratch*:

(setq p 1.1)
(type-of p)


The second yields "float" in the minibuffer. So the capability is there. 
It's just a matter doing some lisp progamming.

Ed

Re: Emacs Telling You the Kind of the Variable Under the Cursor?

[Richard Riley]

Lorenzo Isella <lorenzo.isella@gmail.com> writes:

> Dear All,
> The email title almost says it all.
> I read in a slashdot post that you can configure Emacs so that it will 
> tell you/display somewhere (there were no details in that post) the type 
> of the variable under the cursor.
> This sounds handy, but I have no idea how to activate this feature 
> (given but not granted that it exists really).
> Any hints?
> Cheers
>
> Lorenzo

In which language? I assume not eLisp?

You probably need to look into using the much improved CEDET package.

Here is a good start:

http://cedet.sourceforge.net/
http://xtalk.msk.su/~ott/en/writings/emacs-devenv/EmacsCedet.html

You might consider ECB too which also has a major new release

http://ecb.sf.net/

Re: Emacs Telling You the Kind of the Variable Under the Cursor?

[Anselm Helbig]

Hi!

> The email title almost says it all.
> I read in a slashdot post that you can configure Emacs so that it will 
> tell you/display somewhere (there were no details in that post) the type 
> of the variable under the cursor.
> This sounds handy, but I have no idea how to activate this feature 
> (given but not granted that it exists really).
> Any hints?

I think you're looking for eldoc-mode. I've got this in my .emacs:

(mapc (lambda (mode-hook) 
        (add-hook mode-hook 'turn-on-eldoc-mode))
      '(emacs-lisp-mode-hook lisp-interaction-mode-hook ielm-mode-hook))

In principle this is not limited to elisp, you can implement this
functionality for any language/major-mode, I did a toy implementation
for PHP once.

HTH, 

Anselm


-- 
Anselm Helbig 
mailto:anselm.helbig+news2009@googlemail.com