(emacs newbie) Modifying JDE

[Chris]

Hello all,

(Sorry if this is the wrong place to send this)

I'm at a new job where we absolutely have no budget for software, and have to try and use free everything. For a Java IDE, we first tried NetBeans, which has many problems, and since I've looked at Forte, Eclipse, and JBuilder Personal Edition, none of which I love. I've been messing around with Unix here and there for years, and so in the back of my mind I've long thought that customizing emacs is naturally the way to go. Rather than live with a 100 Meg + IDE that doesn't do what you want, why not take emacs and *build* what you want?

I've used emacs for the last 3 days on a Java project (in plain ol' Java mode), and while there are some things I like, in general the experience has been akin to commuting every day in an old car with no power steering and blown shocks. There's nothing wrong with it, but at the end of the week you're just ragged out. Now, I also know not to blame emacs for this -- it would seem that "there are no bad emacs experiences -- just bad modes!" Or rather, modes that aren't quite to one's liking. If I'm not mistaken there's likely to be nothing I want to do in emacs that can't be customized. Trouble is I don't know how.

In particular, there are a number of things I'd like to be able to do that I can do in TextPad, my shareware editor of choice. Here are things I really miss . . .

- Ctrl-Tab to move among open buffers, just like Alt-Tab moves across applications. Ctrl-X B <Enter> is clunkier, and not quite the same.
- Shift-Arrow (or Page Up/Down or other navigation keys I'm overlooking -- ah yes, Home/End) to select, along with Ctrl-Arrow which moves across words, and <Del> to delete selected text. Ctrl-space, Alt-arrow, Ctrl-W gets you there but too clunky (see "no power steering" above).
- <Tab> indents a selected region, <Shift-Tab> unindents. Very handy.
- A window that lists open buffers, and lets you click on the one you wish to edit
- Less heavy-handedness in specifying tabbing. In particular, I don't ever want to hit <Tab> *and have nothing happen*. (grrr.)
- Ctrl-/ comments a region, Shift-Ctrl-/ uncomments. Very handy. (Actually a JBuilder treat, not TextPad)

And also source-code browsing would be nice, so I could drilldown into methods etc. Ant integration also would be nice.

I believe that for most of these, emacs provides simple functions that need to be key-mapped, and for the rest, the functions can be built from other functions and then keymapped. (The source browsing would be trickier but perhaps I can just steal JDE's.) My only question then is how to get started. I haven't found anything that seems like an "Emacs for Coders and Other Customizers", though I'm sure things exist. The JDE install taught me a little I think -- that you make add-to-list 'load-path calls to dirs that contain .el files, and those files will be loaded and in doing so will add functions to the name space. These functions I imagine are written using certain Emacs 'primitives' and other functions. So perhaps it's all pretty simple. But where to start?

Thanks all,
Chris