Re: code completion

[Richard G Riley]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Richard G Riley <rileyrgdev@gmail.com>
>> Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:56:11 +0100
>> 
>> I have a nasty
>> feeling that using emacs as a C/C++ IDE might be coming to the end of
>> the road as it falls behind in many of the features (code completion,
>> refactoring for an example) that more modern IDEs like Eclipse
>> provides. The maintainer of ecb as good as said the same. A shame.
>
> It's indeed a shame that no one of you young programmers who need this
> ``modern IDE'' stuff steps forward to add such features to Emacs.
> Don't just rely on us old farts!

I'm not a young programmer. And certainly not an elisp programmer. As
for "need" we dont really "need" more than a text editor, but like all
productivity tools sometimes additions like code completion make life a
lot easier.

>
> Every useful feature in Emacs (and elsewhere in Free Software) started
> as a programmer's itch.  There's nothing particularly hard about
> adding this, much of the infrastructure is already there.  All you
> need is a little time and some will power.

A lot more than a little. If adding real code completion was so easy I
think it would be working a lot better - better programmers than me have
attempted it in things like ebrowse, hippy-complete, and senator. I can
only take the somewhat selfish view and hope someone else implements it
:-;

I use solely emacs, but if you're honest you know that something like
Eclipse is a lot better as a Java/C/C++ IDE in many ways. Not all. But
many ways. The things that keep me with emacs are such tools as org-mode
and nxhtml. As well as Gnus of course:-; It's certainly not "dead in the
water" and is a marvellous IDE in many, many ways.