[Emacs-ada-mode] elscreen and speedbar

[Alexy Khrabrov]

On Nov 18, 2007, at 3:22 PM, Stephen Leake wrote:

> Alexy Khrabrov <deliverable at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> If we teach speedbar open a file ina new elscreen's tab (screen), we
>> basically get a poor man's TextMate!  :)
>
> Hmm. Ask.com says TextMate is a "power editor for the Mac".
>
> What, specifically, does TextMate do that Emacs is not doing at the
> moment?

Exactly what I'm after with Emacs -- tabbed editing with filenames on  
the tab tips.  Of course nothing compares in power with Emacs, but  
TextMate is a gen-X's replacement for Ruby and friends.  It uses GUI  
elements such as file tabs and small fonts, small triangles for  
folding, etc.  Bundles -- its modes -- are programmed in bash, of all  
things, and there's a TAB-driven template completion which is  
awesome.  For all my Ruby/Python/XML/HTML editing I switched to  
TextMate, for huge files I have BBEdit, but Ada Mode brought back  
Emacs in me and with Carbon Emacs I must say it's lovely.  BBEdit and  
TextMate are also scriptable in AppleScript, for which now there's a  
full Ruby API.  Ada Mode for TextMate is not even a proper bundle --  
only syntax highlighting, no actions.  Meh.  Back to Emacs!   
Switching between many small separately compiled files really taxes  
an IDE, basically Emacs is needed just to run the mighty Ada Mode.   
Things like ff-find-other-file, speedbar's tags showing packages/ 
functions are extremely useful.

>> After telling it to show ads/adb as discussed here before, speedbar
>> shows Ada files, and under elscreen, loads each into the currently
>> active screen. The only thing left to do (well, with Emacs it's
>> always the first thing to do) is to optionally load it into other
>> window, and then tell elscreen to open a new screen for it instead,
>> similarly to elscreen-dired.
>
> I'm not fully following this, but it sounds like a speedbar
> customization. I don't see why it's Ada mode specific, but if it is,
> it could be packaged with Emacs Ada mode.
>
> If you post your customization here, I'll think about it.

I've asked Naoto of elscreen and Eric of speedbar about it -- my  
elisp voodoo is a bit underwater here.  Looks like elscreen-dired way  
is defadvice, but in speedbar we're switching frames, so it's not  
enough.  There's also speedbar-before-visiting-file-hook, yet in  
speedbar.el looks like it's run from speedbar's own li'l frame and  
only then we (select-frame f) to the file frame and load the file.

Cheers,
Alexy