Introducing Java Mode Plus

There's an extension to Emacs called JDEE which tries to turn Emacs into a heavyweight IDE for Java. I've never had any success with it, and I don't know anyone else who has either. It's difficult to set up, the dependencies are even worse, poorly documented, and then it doesn't seem to work very well anyway. I think it's too divorced from Emacs' core composable functionality to be of much use. I may as well be using a big IDE.

So, instead, as I've posted about over time, I've started with the basic Emacs Java functionality and tweaked my way up from there. I've extended it enough that I decided to package it up on it's own, and hopefully others will find it useful too. I call it java-mode-plus!

git clone git://github.com/skeeto/emacs-java.git

Specifically: java-mode-plus.el

It provides a hook into java-mode that creates a bunch of new bindings. It also creates some new globally-available functions like open-java-project. It's all heavily Ant-based since that's what I like to use. It wouldn't be very hard to modify it to use Maven, if that's what your thing.

My very thorough documentation is in a large header comment in the source file itself. I cover my whole workflow from top to bottom. If you're interested in making Emacs more Java-friendly take a look at it. It's not a lot of code, but each line has been thoughtfully added after hours and hours of Java development.

• java
• emacs