Andy's Laboratory

Monday, January 1, 2007

Xcode Feature Request

I really want to use Xcode to edit Objective-C. I desperately want to. Xcode 3 comes closer to being a usable editor, but I really wish that Xcode had the following feature:

I never liked navigating around the brackets in Objective-C, so this was something I hacked into Emacs pretty early on while adapting to Cocoa.

On the topic of editors, there's a cool editor for Scheme called DivaScheme. It's heavily influenced by vi and it makes navigating through code a breeze. Much of what is cool in DivaScheme is possible because Scheme and Lisp's syntax is so minimal, but I don't see why the concept can't be applied to Obj-C as well. If you are planning to write Yet Another Text Editor, please do us all a favor and click the link below. The page has a short video tutorial.

Link to DivaScheme

Posted by Andy Kim # 2:19 AM

Comments:

Is the video from Emacs? In any case, TextMate does this, and it's just one of many tricks in its bag. The other nice one is Control-Q for vertically aligning multi-argument messages.

# posted by Scott Stevenson : January 1, 2007 5:48 AM

TextMate really is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I hope you've filed a bug with Apple on this one. :)

# posted by Justin Williams : January 1, 2007 7:47 AM

That movie is actually from a heavily customized CarbonEmacs.

I just tried TextMate's auto-bracket insertion feature and it doesn't work quite the way I expect it to with the brackets of the second argument, but I think it's just a matter of getting used to it. I keep going back to Emacs after trying TextMate every time, but the urge to whip out my credit card gets greater each time I do try it :) My hats off to Allan Odgaard.

# posted by Andy Kim : January 1, 2007 2:23 PM

I don't like sliced bread.

Andy, do I get this right, emacs is the editor XCode uses, right? This means, I can get this feature right inside XCode. If that's the case, could you please release it to the public, so that mister everyone could have this!

# posted by Kenneth : January 3, 2007 7:57 AM

Yeah...I love Cocoa, but that's my one biggest gripe with Smalltalk syntax, and really any sort of infix messaging/expressions (think LISP). You have to know when you start exactly how many levels of nesting you're going to use. AND if you come back and change it later, you have to change it twice. Oh well.

I'm sure there's "a" way to hack this into Xcode, but I'm not going to try it any time soon.

# posted by Jordy/JediKnil : June 25, 2007 12:43 AM

The emacs theme looks great. What are you using for the theme?

I'm using color-theme, but in my emacs not nearly as many syntactic elements are colored. Any suggestions?

# posted by Matt Ronge : November 24, 2007 11:40 PM

Matt:

I'm just using the CarbonEmacs that you can get here:

http://homepage.mac.com/zenitani/emacs-e.html

I've been using it for a few years now and it's been the best Emacs build that I could find for the Mac.

I'll send you my .emacs file by email. Maybe you'll find something useful there.

# posted by Andy Kim : November 25, 2007 9:32 PM

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Monday, January 1, 2007

Xcode Feature Request

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