Re: Slickedit features in Emacs?

["Stefan Monnier" <monnier+gnu.emacs.help/news/@flint.cs.yale.edu>]

>>>>> "Henrik" == Henrik Jönsson <henrik.jonsson@se.transport.bombardier.com> writes:
> * Autocompletion of expressions. When the user write "if " it expands
> automatically into a full if template. Can this be done with
> skeletons?

Others have already replied.  While we're here.  What do people think of
extending `define-skeleton' with some options to put the skeleton in
an abbrev table ?  Something like

   (define-skeleton my-skeleton-c-if
     "Insert a c if statement"
     :abbrev ("ifx" c-mode-abbrev-table)
     nil
     "if (" > _ ")" \n
     "{" > \n \n "}" >)

> * "Intellisense".

Depends on the language.
I use it everyday in elisp.  I've used it in CommonLisp as well where
it also worked very nicely (by querying an inferior CL process).
It also works for LaTeX if you use AUCTeX.
I know it supposedly also works well in Java with JDE (which also works by
querying an inferior process).
For non-OO languages, I expect that completion based on a TAGS table should
work nicely.

> I know that semantic can do something like this, but
> does it work for everyday use? Has anyone tried it?

I've never really used it, so I wouldn't know.

> * Dynamic Tagging. Go to the function declaration etc. I haven't used
> tags that much.

IIRC, recent version of `etags' can efficiently refresh a TAGS file,
such that you can do something like (add-hook 'after-save-hook
'etags-refresh) and have your tags table updated whenever you save.
But I can't remember the details and I wouldn't be surprised if some
elisp snippet is still missing.


        Stefan