What happened to emacs' java?

Question

First of all, I do not want to start a religious war here, and pardon me for telling you a little story first.

I originally chose emacs as my editor of choice during the time when I was able to make a choice. As an intern I was forced to use Vi for a small software shop where we are required to ssh to the servers (not to mention a very slow connection) and edit code from there because we're not allowed to have local copies of the source code. During that time, I was an Emacs uber noob who doesn't know about tramp. I didn't even know that I could start a shell at Emacs, so I gave Vi a try just to see what's in it for me.

At first, it felt like being forced to wear clothes I don't like, but time passed by and I came to like Vim. Two years of vim (and still counting) has been very productive learning experience for me. My current setup involves xmonad - a window manager, gnu screen - for fast shell switching, firefox with vimperator, and of course, vim. At work, I do my coding stuff using Vim+Eclim because all my other co-workers use Eclipse and I have to conform somewhat. In my workplace, I'm regarded as the guy who knows his way around Vim; but still, I secretly use Emacs at home.

I want to get back up to speed in Emacs, but in order for me to do that, I must use it for what I'm currently doing at work because I spend most of my time there. Vim+Eclim really helped me a lot with java stuff (code completion, imports, etc.) and I'm thinking of using its Emacs port, but I'm also trying out other alternatives that would not require me to have an eclipse process running in the background. Basically, I want something with code completion and on-save compile like what Eclipse/Eclim has. Is jdee/malabar mode enough to do this? Also, I'm coding Android stuff and I want Emacs to know where the Android libraries are, since most of the fundamental ones aren't usually imported as normal.

Answer 1

I've just recently discovered Auto Java Complete which provides code completion for Java using AutoComplete and yasnippet to provide quite good code completion for Java. This is a lot easier to set up IMHO than JDEE. I've not had much success with malabar mode, although the two could probably be used together without much trouble.

This does completion using a custom tags database so you can easily set it up for Android as well, you just need to get it to parse the android.jar along with your existing system java libraries - see the stuff on using Tags.java and setting CLASSPATH appropriately in the README.

Answer 2

First, there are some attempts to mimic (more or less) emacs behaviour into Eclipse, mainly by providing the keyboard wealthness of that lispean editor.

Second, you can always go the JDEE way which I believe to be quite a complete Java IDE in Emacs (having some support support for maven, from what I understand).