I’ve been using emacs-eclim for java development fulltime for well over two years now, and I’ve been a co-maintainer for a couple of months, but I’ve never really written anything about it. I guess part of it is because I’m way too lazy to do a big write-up explaining all the moving parts and how it relates to eclim and eclipse. You know, a proper blog post.
Like most java programmers, I was a long-time eclipse victim. If you’re not from the java world yourself, it might be hard to grasp the love/hate relationship that all java programmers have with this IDE. Or hate/hate relationship, as it may be. Sure, some people turn to NetBeans or IntelliJ, but you can’t get away from the fact that eclipse has in essence steamrolled all over the java IDE space. Eclipse is everywhere.
Incidentally, ‘steamrolled’ is an appropriate word here, as it suggests huge mass and inertia bordering on inevitability, both of which are also properties of eclipse itself. It takes forever to start up, and if you actually manage to kick off a complex build operation, it’s impossible to interrupt it.
Emacs was my escape. But the story is kind of complicated. You see, there was this bunch of enterprising vim hackers that realized that even though their editor was the greatest thing since sliced bread, it wasn’t really that good at handling large java codebases, something which eclipse is atually pretty competent at. So they wrote a plugin for eclipse that turned it into a kind of server, and a vim extension that acted as a client, and then they could edit the code in vim, while leveraging the strengths of eclipse, such as command completion, compilation, and refactoring. And they called it eclim.
Then another enterprising fellow ported the client libraries
to emacs, and the result was emacs-eclim. It was a bit rough at
first, but it is improving steadily. In the past year, we’ve gotten
auto-complete-mode support, inline error highlighting, improved
handling of import statements and numerous bug fixes. Right now I’m
working on making calls to the eclimd backend asynchronous, to make
editing more responsive. It kind of works, but right now it’s ugly.
I actually have no idea how many users we have. There are 116 people watching the project on Github right now, and bug reports are being filed every now and then, so I’d like to think that at least someone finds it worthwhile.