Emacs and Java

[Francesco Mazzoli <f@mazzo.li>]

Hi,

As much as I dislike Java, I find myself having to write Java code from time to
time, and I'm sure that a lot of you are in the same situation.

Given that, I find it very surprising that support for the Java language in
Emacs is abysmal.

I tried:

  * java-mode: does not support any modern Java construct, and with modern I
    mean >= Java 5 (generics, foreach loops, enums).
  * JDEE: seems to be completely unmaintained and barely working with modern
    emacsen, and lacking support for post-2004 Java as well.
  * malabar-mode <https://github.com/espenhw/malabar-mode/>: promises support
    for what JDEE is lacking.  Building with stock Maven and Emacs on Ubuntu
    12.04 fails.  There is a fork (<https://github.com/buzztaiki/malabar-mode>)
    that seems more maintained but building fails there as well with a different
    error.

So it seems that there is no way to at least edit comfortably Java code, let
alone have flymake, semantic features, etc.  This seems a huge gap in what is
the best editor out there.

Am I correct, or is there hope in some project I haven't considered?
malabar-mode seems to be the best candidate (if you can get it working) but
frankly I'm not that comfortable using it since it pulls a huge number of
dependencies and I don't want something to fancy anyway.

--
Francesco * Often in error, never in doubt