RE: Emacs and Java

["Ludwig, Mark" <ludwig.mark@siemens.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Francesco Mazzoli
> Sent: Friday, September 14, 2012 6:25 AM
> To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> Subject: Emacs and Java
> 
> 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.

I use cc-mode, which does a reasonable job for my Java work.

I have to confess to being unhappy about the fact that cc-mode knows nothing about the object-oriented nature of Java.  I make up for that myself through heavy use of tags, which I build with custom extras to pick up interface definitions.

Note further that I have not tried the current etags (v24), which might pick up interface definitions....

Hope this helps,
Mark