Re: refactoring tool

[Anselm Helbig]

hi pedro!

At Thu, 08 Dec 2005 00:58:02 +0000,
Pedro Sa da Costa wrote:
> 
> I'm sorry to ask again, but there is any refactoring tool for emacs, 
> besides xrefactory?

sorry, i can't help you there. you can do a search-and-replace with
regexps over a directory tree (see the emacs manual about dired for
this), but maybe that's not enough for you. 


> Emacs does have code completion? If not, what tool can i install? And, 
> what is the shortcut key for this feature?

emacs has code completion for quite some languages. that's not so much
a feature of emacs, but a feature of the programming modes for these
languages (and many, many of them are part of emacs, so, uh, well...).

completion is usually triggered with M-TAB. and dabbrev-expand is
really useful, which is by default bound to M-/. 

the latter always works, but for real code completion you have to
choose the right mode. generally speaking, there's the TAGS feature,
but you have to generate and load an index (a `TAGS' file) before you
can use it. then there's `semantic', which i never used myself, with a
general lexer written in lisp. for xml, there's the great nxml-mode,
which uses rng schemas. 

> Can anybody give me the reasons why emacs is better than eclipse? I 
> think that is hard to find tools for emacs, know how to use them, and 
> hard to install and configure.

why do you ask us if emacs /is better than/ eclipse? this is a matter
of taste, and furthermore, maybe eclipse is a better tool for some
jobs, and emacs for other ones. 

> Because i have many work in the job, i don't have many time to learn
> advanced features of emacs . So, i'm forced to use eclipse, because
> it's easy to install the plugins, and i think that exists more
> plugins for eclipse than for emacs. My co-workers also use eclipse.

> But, my desire is to be an emacs geek.

aha. 8-) but you don't have time to learn, and find it unnecessarily
complex? so where does that desire to be an emacs geek come from?

> What can i do to win this handicap, and learn the emacs advanced
> features? Any advices? What is the best book to learn emacs? And,
> how can anybody deal with plenty of shortcuts keys that emacs has?
> Isn't too much for anybody's head?

it can't be stressed enough: the info manual is really excellent. and
it's always available. it is well written, has examples and can be
used for learning as well as a reference. 

furthermore, emacs is not only free software, but in the way it is
designed, it is extremely open to the user, meaning, with a few
keystrokes you can find out what function a certain key calls, what
this function is supposed to do, and then look up the file in which it
is defined.

you don't have to know all of the keystrokes there are in all the
modes you are using. you just have to know what functions you want to
use, and then it's easy to look them up. C-h i, C-h m, C-h a, C-h k
and C-h f are your friends.

they did call emacs self-documenting for a reason. 

about the emacs-vs-eclipse issue, there are some endless discussions
on usenet you could look up. search for them on google groups... oh,
sorry, you said, you did not have much time. 8-)

ok, why do _I_ like emacs better than eclipse? openness, hackability,
everything is keyboard driven, feels fast (compared with eclipse),
also usable for simple tasks/system administration, great text
manipulation functions, lisp rocks. cons: well, integration of modern
gui widgets would be nice. 

hope that helps. 8-)

kind regards and: happy hacking!

anselm