Re: IDE tools for maintaining Emacs Lisp programs (Org in particular)

[Eric Schulte <eric.schulte@gmx.com>]

Jambunathan K <kjambunathan@gmail.com> writes:

> Jambunathan K <kjambunathan@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> For all practical purposes, I find this be sufficient.
>>
>> (global-set-key (kbd "C-c f")
>> 		(lambda ()
>> 		  (interactive)
>> 		  (require 'finder)
>> 		  (let ((thing (intern (thing-at-point 'symbol))))
>> 		    (if (functionp thing)
>> 			(find-function thing)
>> 		      (find-variable thing)))))
>>
>> Put your cursor on a variable or a function, C-c f and you are staring
>> right at the definition of the variable or function.  For this to work,
>> the library defining the function or variable should already be
>> loaded.
>
> Just discovered this from find-func.el
>
> (require 'find-func)
> (find-function-setup-keys)
>
> will install the below keymap for you.
>

Thanks for pointing this out, I have a feeling the find-func
functionality will quickly become core to my elisp file navigation.

To answer the original question, I also tend towards a minimal setup.  I
do all of my editing directly in elisp source files, and I don't use
tags or etags or anything like that.

I use the describe-function and describe-variable help functions with
tab completion *very* frequently to find functions and variables
relevant to my current task, and to then jump to their source.

When drilling into either a bug or unfamiliar functionality I find
edebug invaluable.  Evaluating functions with a prefix argument "C-u
eval-defun" instruments them for interactive step-by-step evaluation
with edebug.

Also, I highly recommend both paredit and the sexp-edit operations
(kill-sexp, paredit-backward-up, paredit-forward, etc...) to anyone
working on any lisp source code.

-- 
Eric Schulte
http://cs.unm.edu/~eschulte/