Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

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Sun, 13 Apr 2008 07:39:23 GMT

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re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

Anthony — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 11:47:26 GMT

Will you please post your .emacs file?

Thanks,

Anthony

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

Aemon — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 19:58:17 GMT

Have you checked out flymake-mode? It ships with emacs 22; it periodically invokes a compiler on your current buffer, highlights errors etc. Seems like a natural fit for a statically typed, one-file-equals-one-class language like C#.

-Aemon

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

Barry Kelly — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 20:07:34 GMT

I use a variety of editors for general purpose code writing, but the only reasons I end up firing an IDE are (1) debugging, (2) intellisense and (3) code navigation (goto definition, goto declaration, with automatic disassembly of the public interface where necessary). Without 1, 2 and 3, I'd have no need for an IDE. However, by your own admission, these are exactly the things that emacs wouldn't give me, so it all amounts to not being a reason to use emacs (note that doesn't mean "a reason not to use emacs; I mean absence of a reason, not a reason to avoid).

The main editor for general purpose stuff is joe, running in Cygwin. I have it configured for syntax highlighting for all the languages I use; combined with ctags it has very very rudimentary goto support. I can write macros for snippets, which I usually don't end up using. About the only one I use is for braces: insert '{' here, return twice (with indent), insert '}', go up one line, tab.

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

Sammy Larbi — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 20:28:25 GMT

Is it possible to release what you've done as a handy-dandy install / plugin?

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

she — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 22:35:49 GMT

The problem is that while emacs and vim will always be flexible, they require a lot of knowledge, time etc... to gather stuff.

And while you may know and enjoy writing elisp code, I simply refuse to learn something specifically for one program. I could live with python or ruby these days, or with a human-readable nice and easy special language, but learning lisp just so that i maximize using emacs sounds like sure overkill, especially cuz i would know i wouldnt really use lisp outside from that (sorry lispers)

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

Pesinos — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 23:11:06 GMT

The work you did would be valuable to people that wish to have a similar development environment. By using your experience to create an automatic installer, you'd have many greatful people (including me).

If that wouldn't be feasible for you, just making a blog entry with all the steps outlined would be the next best thing.

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

Andy Norris — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:16:43 GMT

Another request for you to post all the relevant source: .emacs and all the modified elisp files. It would be great to get a C# mode set up without having to reinvent everything you did.

Also, I've started looking at modifying Tuareg mode into a full F# mode, and it would be great to take a look at some of the things you did and try to do something equivalent.

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

Seth Morris — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:20:59 GMT

I can see this being useful for Mono developers, but I would never recommend emacs as a "standard" in any company trying to make money. It requires too much training and it's impressive customizability means no developer can work at another dev's desk.

It also isn't worth giving up Team integration, refactoring tools (although some version of those do exist for C++ in emacs, I don't know if there are good c# versions), etc.

But I'm biased. The first emacs setup I used launched with the text "If you need help, press [some key combination]." That key combination launched Eliza....

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

Jacob — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:23:08 GMT

About folding.el and hideshow.el, I have just been using C-u <num> C-x $ to fold on indentation level. Is hideshow.el significantly better?

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

DotNetInterop — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 05:44:55 GMT

OK, in response to the requests from Sammy and Pesinos, I will package up what I do, to try to make it installable and re-usable for just about anyone. I don't have a linux machine though, so can't test it there. Gotta think about the best way to deliver it. It's maybe just a zip of the elisp files and the snippets and the templates.

I was hesitant to pack it up just yet, because I think intellisense is a big hole. Also I will have to look into the flymake minor mode.

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

DotNetInterop — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 08:49:55 GMT

Oooooh, I added the flymake stuff, which now works. It's nifty. I like it.

Flymake is at least 5 years old, but it still seems to be a bit rough. There's no doc in the el file. It doesn't respect the "compile-command" variable of compile.el, instead hard-coding make. There are a bunch of other missed opportunities for customization in flymake, too. There's no doc for how to specify a different check-syntax build. There's no doc for how to do a better cleanup - so I have temporary output files hanging around. Why isn't flymake-allowed-file-name-masks an alist? Basically flymake is bad manners all around. But it's mostly working now, and it seems very handy.

I show what I did to get flymake to work with C#, in this post.

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

anon — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 11:06:03 GMT

Have you tried setting up etags for intellisense? I did that some time ago and it worked great.

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

MasterChief — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:39:49 GMT

You are so lame man... you spent all that time just so you have MOST of the features you get for free on the C# express. lol you FAIL at seeing the big picture

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

DotNetInterop — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 03:54:13 GMT

MasterChief, thanks for commenting. Thanks for pointing out how LAME I am. Very helpful. Let me ask you something though - Did you read the article? I spent all that time to see how much time it would take me, and what I would get for my time.

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

DotNetInterop — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 05:37:31 GMT

@Jacob - I don't know if hideshow is better or worse than that magic incantation of keystrokes you provided. I didn't read the spellbook on collapsing text, so I'm not sure I've picked the optimal mechanism there. But what I have is built-in to emacs (from v22.2 at least) and it works for me .

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

Blair — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 18:40:47 GMT

Hey you do know that their is an Emacs mode inside of VS 2005 and higher; just go to Tools ->Options-> Enviroment->Keyboard and select Emacs.

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

Aemon — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 01:50:17 GMT

RE: Flymake

Agreed! flymake needs to be a much more general tool -- there's a lot more you can do with external programs than just highlight errors. Imagine if you could plugin profilers, syntax checkers etc...

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

Hernan Garcia — Sat, 17 May 2008 18:41:57 GMT

I have been looking for lightweight alternatives to do C# development for a while, so far nothing really click with me.

I'm not sure if I could use emacs (I haven't used before) but I will give it a try.

Thanks for this post, very interesting stuff.

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

Dan — Fri, 30 May 2008 17:57:45 GMT

That's quite cool but what about the debug style features in C# - like rewriting some of the code while debugging and then seeing the changes immediately. Or dragging around the step though cursor back in "instruction time". These are some of the things I find quite useful. As is hovering the mouse over variables to see their value.

I like the idea of emacs - I'd love to program my own commands and I quite like lisp - even emacs-lisp :D But I couldn't give up the comfort and ease of use of Visual Studio. Especially programming C# which is where is really excels.

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

Allan — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:55:43 GMT

I've tried the emacs mode in VS 2005. It's ok, it gives you the most common keybindings, but it is NOT like using emacs.

There's a set of VB macros floating around somewhere that will give you an emacs-ish experience in MS Word as well.

I use emacs to edit C# code, but I use VS to build and otherwise work on "solutions". I've never liked intellisense too much, and I debug by instrumenting and understanding my code, not by stepping line-by-line through with a debugger. So given my style, I have not yet found enough motivation to try to create a full .NET IDE in emacs.

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

gareth — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:24:02 GMT

I came up with almost the same solution, nice to see I haven't missed much. I have VS though so I can use one simplification which is to use the .sln file to build: I have a function which looks upwards in the directory tree from the current buffer for a .proj or .sln file and compiles it through the devenv.com program in an emacs compilation buffer.

For intellisense, tags work fine together with HHelper (which can be used as a command line searchable msdn). These days I only fire up the VS gui once or twice a day for stepthrough debugging.

I have to say I wouldn't recommend someone learn emacs just to avoid VS if VS is available. You've got to appreciate it as an all-in-one solution, I do sql queries, file access, even launching programs from inside emacs, the power comes in customizing it to your exact desires, but you've got to have those desires.

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

Joe D. DeJohn — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 21:46:17 GMT

We used emacs in college for writing C++. It was great to use as an IDE. Really do miss it even if I did not use it for very long. It's great that someone has actually gone the route in having emacs support(partial) for C#.

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

Timothy Murray — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 05:12:39 GMT

Great post, thanks--your efforts are definitely NOT lame.

As a contractor, I have to maintain cross platform proficiency and xemacs/cygwin on dos really helps me maintain that. Your site really helps as well.

fwiw, (I am new to c# and .net) I can run the .Net 3.5 SDK shell in xemacs on cygwin. I am definitely going to implement your setup for c# dev with the Powershell.

That port of the Beanshell to the Powershell is really interesting stuff; I will be implementing it at my current gig.

fwiw, check out planner.el --ms outlook for emacsen

Cordially,

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

Tyson — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 02:42:31 GMT

Aemon: C# is statically typed, but not "one-file-equals-one-class". You can have any number of toplevel classes in a file, and name the file anything you want.

And I'm not sure what that has to do with flymake-mode: I love flymake even (especially?) for completely untyped languages. A dumb syntax error is still a syntax error. I'll have to figure out how to hook up C# to it now...

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

adf — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 23:29:03 GMT

I'm surprised you aren't using Semantic. It does pretty much exactly what you want. cf. http://cedet.sourceforge.net/intellisense.shtml

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

DotNetInterop — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 03:40:49 GMT

I looked into semantic - http://blogs.msdn.com/dotnetinterop/archive/2008/04/21/c-code-completion-in-emacs-a-look-at-cedet-semantic-and-csde.aspx

...I found it wanting....but then was able to augment it with CSDE-Shell and get code completion.

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

that's what she — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 03:34:12 GMT

I find your information to be suspect since you claim to be an emacs user and yet fail to malign and condemn Visual Studio.

On a more serious note, I find it reassuring that there exist people who see value in both options! I keep trying to get into emacs, wondering if the frothing-at-the-mouth emacs-fanatics may have some secret, but I guess for the type of work I do it may not be worth the effort. And while VS may not be the world's best text editor, I do lovelovelove its code completion and code navigation.

re: Emacs is better than Visual Studio as a C# Development Tool?!!

DotNetInterop — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 08:09:01 GMT

Ha - well there's a time and a place for frothing at the mouth, and it is not while typing in a text editor. Emacs is useful to me but I wouldn't recommend to anyone that they go out and learn it themselves. Unless you have a supportive community of expert emacs users, and maybe a background in lisp, it will be hard to justify the effort.