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Mon, 26 Aug 2013

Developing Android in Emacs

It's been weeks, maybe months, since I fired up Eclipse (or Android Studio) to do any Android programming. I do everything with emacs, vi, ant, astyle, adb, and the Android commands "android" and "monitor".

The last thing really pulling me into Eclipse was the Control-Shift-O that automatically pulled in imports for Android. I have begun solving that in Emacs. Now I have this in my Emacs init file:

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/jdee-2.4.1/lisp")
(setq jde-global-classpath '("/usr/local/android-sdks/platforms/android-18/android.jar"))
(load "jde")

I downloaded the Java Development Environment for Emacs, and point to the android jar for a classpath. Now if I want to automatically import a class such as TextView, I put my cursor over a TextView and type Control-C-V-Z. I confirm TextView, and then the class is auto-imported.

Sometimes I am given several choices and I choose the most appropriate one. Unlike the Eclipse one, I get more false choices and some of them are non-Android and bogus. I can work on this, although it has not been a big problem.

Sometimes I run ant debug in one window, see what classes need importing, then do the Control-C-V-Z for various classes in the other windows.

I'm sure I can automate this more but it works for me now.

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