Gerbil development with Emacs

The natural home for Gerbil development is Emacs, the ultimate parenthesis manipulation machine.

Setting Up

Gerbil comes with a custom editing mode, which extends scheme-mode with font-lock and indentation for Gerbil code: gerbil.el. See below for additional functionality provided by gerbil-mode.

You can add it to your autoload path (eg by linking in $HOME/.emacs.d) and adding this to your .emacs:

(autoload 'gerbil-mode "gerbil" "Gerbil editing mode." t)

You should further utilize Gambit's inferior mode, as it offers debugger integration with sources on emacs. It lives in $GAMBIT_HOME/share/emacs/site-lisp/gambit.el.

You can add it to your autoload path and then add this to your .emacs:

(require 'gambit)
(add-hook 'inferior-scheme-mode-hook 'gambit-inferior-mode)

You can then make gxi your scheme program by setting scheme-program-name:

(defvar gerbil-program-name
  (expand-file-name "~/gerbil/bin/gxi")) ; Set this for your GERBIL_HOME
(setq scheme-program-name gerbil-program-name)

And you can now run Gerbil with M-x run-scheme.

TAGS

Gerbil comes with a tool to build emacs tags from Gerbil sources, called gxtags.

By default, the build script creates tags for the system in $GERBIL_HOME/src/TAGS. This tags table contains all exported symbols for the Gerbil prelude, standard library, compiler and expander. They allow you to easily browse Gerbil code, and also explore the system.

You can load the tags table with M-x visit-tags-table and selecting the tags file. If you want it to be a permanent part of your editing experience, you can add $GERBIL_HOME/src to your tags table list by adding this to your .emacs:

(add-to-list 'tags-table-list "~/gerbil/src/TAGS")

The Gerbil package manager also generates a TAGS table for all installed packages; by default this lives in ~/.gerbil/pkg/TAGS. You can add this to your emacs tags table list with

(add-to-list 'tags-table-list "~/.gerbil/pkg/TAGS")

You should also generate tags for your own code by using gxtags. The invocation is very simple:

gxtags [-a] [-o TAGS] source-file-or-directory ...

Gerbil Mode Interactive Functions

Aside from indentation and fontification, gerbil-mode provides a handful of interactive functions useful for Gerbil development:

M-x gerbil-import-current-buffer
M-x reload-current-buffer
M-x compile-current-buffer

These functions import, reload, and compile the source module visited by the current buffer respectively. They link syntax errors back to ths source by popping the offending buffer at the point of offense.

M-x gerbil-build

This function builds the current Gerbil source tree by invoking the first build.ss script discovered by walking up the directory hierarchy.

SLIME Integration

There is preliminary support for SLIME using ecraven's r7rs-swank.

See drewc's guide for how to set it up.