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What is this?

erlmode intends to replace the erlang-mode from OTP as a major-mode for editing Erlang code in Emacs that Just Works(tm).

It should have sane defaults and require as little setup as possible. The idea is to use pure elisp for as many features as possible, instead of relying on external tools like ctags or a running Erlang VM.

For things like debugging, compiling, running tests, etc. you do however need a running node, porting over the required functionality from Distel needed for these things are in the works.

Install

(add-to-list ‘load-path ”path/to/erlmode-root”) (require ‘erlmode-start)

What it gives you

  • You should not have to specify an erlang-root-dir
  • You will have automagic ‘tags’ support, using M-. and M-, you will be able to jump to definitions of various Erlang language constructs, including:
    • functions (local, external, imported, etc.)
    • records
    • macros
    • header files
    • modules
  • Some indentation fixes and breakages for nicely aligning various parens and commas, etc.
  • Probably other things I’m forgetting now.

Bindings

M-. – jump to source M-, – jump back from source C-c C-f – ido file-listing of project modules

What’s planned

Apart from having a huge todo list the things closest in the future is an eldoc version for Erlang code and porting over auto-complete-distel and hippie-expand-distel to use erlmode code for completion.

Erlang VM runtime interaction

Elisp parts of Distel that is needed for communicating with an Erlang node will be moved over into erlmode to provide a way of communicating with a node that will run.

Notes

To provide the code jumping features this mode tries to guess a project root and index relevant files. One codebase at work I’m trying this out on contains ~3800 .erl and .hrl files, indexing that takes around 1.4s with the SSD I’m running. If you’re running an old mechanical disk it should take more time, together with indexing the OTP modules it might take several seconds. This beats having to (successfully) compile your code base to be able to use debug info from beam files.

If this indexing time seems to be an issue I’ll probably move the incremental indexing plans up the todo list.

Yes, this is not the academic way of doing things. The parsing is ad-hoc and ugly and simple guesses most of the time, but most things seem to work out of the box. Until I get around to finishing the semantic wisent parser for Erlang code this is the way it will work.

Bugs?

Most likely lots of them.