EMacs on OS/X for Rails development
by jcf. Average Reading Time: less than a minute.
Being a step-by-step guide as an aide for the failing memory. Inspired by the screenshots of Dee Zsombor
- Get a Tiger compatible Emacs
- (unfortunately Aquamacs does strange (i.e non-emacs) things with it’s windows, so ECB falls on it’s face)
- Install RubyMode.el (from the Ruby distribution)
- Download ECB
- Download supporting libraries (eieio, speedbar, semantic) and install them (usually make, make install and an entry in .emacs)
- Download MMM (Multiple-Major-Modes) so you have support for both HTML and ERB in those .rhtml files
- get ruby-electric.el and install it
- find the SVN mode for Emacs and install it
- Scott has some tips on MMM and ERB templates
- ido.el is a nice extension for switching buffers and finding files
All my extensions are in ~/lisp and that file (as well as ~/.emacs) are under version control in Subversion. That way, I can check out my workspace on any machine and have a configured way of doing things.
see my .emacs file for a possible way of doing this
All of this should work on a Windows box too
Technorati Tags: emacs, ruby on rails
Excellent! Always good to see emacs being used to hack Rails. I’ve been running gnu emacs from their CVS, it’s the only one I could get to build/work reliably on OSX 10.3 (XEmacs worked fine, but for some reason takes an EON to load color-theme.el). I’ll check out that carbon emacs package, looks like it’s built from CVS. If it means a little less work for me, I’m all for it.
Thanks for the tips.
Excellent! Always good to see emacs being used to hack Rails. I’ve been running gnu emacs from their CVS, it’s the only one I could get to build/work reliably on OSX 10.3 (XEmacs worked fine, but for some reason takes an EON to load color-theme.el). I’ll check out that carbon emacs package, looks like it’s built from CVS. If it means a little less work for me, I’m all for it.
Thanks for the tips.
Aquamacs (http://aquamacs.org) works fine, and no need to compile… There’s an option to turn off the non-Emacs-like windows behavior.
Thanks for the tips! All this stuff is quite useful no matter what platform you’re on.
Long live Emacs!
After I follow your guide, mmm-mode seems not make ruby code syntax high light between or .
Is it true?
and now http://cryptocracy.hn.org/~cartel/elisp/snippet.el . seems to have mostly python stuff so far..
and of course you need to disable XFT hinting and use MSFT’s excellent Consolas font (their best creation/curation in the last decade?) and it even looks like textmate, not just acts.,well ive never used textmate, but also never realized emacs could be such an incredible exoskeleton..
Hi, I saw in Dee Zsombor’s screenshots that ruby-mode text enclosed in a single line ie:
‘search_spinner’, :style => ‘display:none;’ %>
is properly font-lock highlighted.
Under my setup (and others) we’re observing a strange bug where mmm-mode does not font-lock highlight submodes when the tags are contained on the same line. Information about this is contained here,
http://bugs.gentoo.org/showbug.cgi?id=125420
and
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?threadid=8644105&forum_id=5108
Did you encounter this bug yourself and/or have you heard about others experiencing this? Do you know of a fix or additional information about this?
Thanks,
Brandon
Hi Brandon
no – I don’t know about that bug. I must confess, that I have switched from Emacs to TextMate for Rails development. On Mac OS X, TextMate is much easier to work with…
[...] and a nice weblog article EMacs on OS/X for Rails development that was quite helpful. [...]
There is a screencast (1.8 Mb) showing some of Emacs features (for Ruby on Rails) that people have seen in TextMate. I am planning to post tips on http://agilemacs.blogspot.com/ if there is interest.