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Comment by cujo | Hacker News Reader

I love emacs, but it seems like most of my programming for pay is trending towards languages where there is a huge advantage to using a "modern" ide. I'm talking mainly of java/jvm languages and objc here.

I don't expect emacs (the community really) to all of a sudden provide awesome packages for that type of development, but it saddens me that I get more locked in to these other ides that I don't view as generally superior.

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At least for Java (and probably most other languages) (emacs-)eclim can leverage Eclipse functionality (for Emacs, Vim, ...). So you'll get the same completion, refactoring methods and so on.

https://github.com/senny/emacs-eclim, http://eclim.org/

How do I not know about this?!?!?! Thanks for sharing the link, do you have any experience to share? Does it work well?

EDIT: If this works as advertised here [1] then I am all in!

[1] -- http://www.skybert.net/emacs/java/

It would actually be cool to have a ninite.com for Emacs configurations, where one could choose from the best pre-configured crowd-sourced Emacs versions for several use cases and platforms (e.g. web-design, Java-programming or reproducible research). Sure, extending Emacs from scratch is fun, but many people are probably reluctant having to spend many hours to achieve a good configuration because they are not guaranteed to benefit from the result.

But you then need eclipse installed also right? I use intellij for my java needs and it makes me content the bulk of the time. Having used emacs + jdee back in the day I'm afraid of the lost hours to trying emacs+<insert hack here> again.

Yes, that's also one of the reasons I didn't pursue this, the other one that I wanted to be able to use other peoples machines (including shortcuts etc.) as well.

It's a tradeoff; Eclipse has a lot of understanding of the different languages, which seems to me is not really worthwhile to rebuild in Elisp if you can just reuse it this way.

We shouldn't forget SLIME for Lisp[1][2] and Geiser for Scheme.[3]

[1] - http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLIME

[3] - http://www.nongnu.org/geiser/

SLIME is awesome, but how does this apply to java/jvm languages though?

I work on Android at Facebook. I write a ton of C++ and Java for that environment. I use Emacs to do it and have no problems aside from the occasional cc-mode bug.

Then again, I don't care much for autocompletion. I started on a IntelliJ Emacs integration a few months ago: the idea was to run Rhino in an IntelliJ plugin and have IntelliJ and Emacs talk to each other using JavaScript. I got as far as getting completion working, but decided I didn't need it. If there's a real need, maybe I can dust off this "bad-idea mode".

Ensime[0] for scala.

[0]https://github.com/ensime/

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