3.12 Emacs Interface

This section explains how to use the GNU Emacs interface for SICStus Prolog, and how to customize your GNU Emacs environment for it. Note that the SPIDER IDE (see SPIDER) has many more features than the GNU Emacs interface.

Emacs is a powerful programmable editor especially suitable for program development. It is available for free for many platforms, including various UNIX dialects, Windows and macOS. For information about GNU Emacs, see https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/.

The advantages of using SICStus in the Emacs environment are source-linked debugging, auto indentation, syntax highlighting, help on predefined predicates (requires the SICStus info files to be installed), loading code from inside Emacs, auto-fill mode, and more.

The Emacs interface is not part of SICStus Prolog proper, but is included in the distribution for convenience. It was written by Emil Åström and Milan Zamazal, based on an earlier version of the mode written by Masanobu Umeda. Contributions have also been made by Johan Andersson, Peter Olin, Mats Carlsson, Johan Bevemyr, Stefan Andersson, Per Danielsson, Per Mildner, Henrik Båkman, and Tamás Rozmán. Some ideas and also a few lines of code have been borrowed (with permission) from Oz.el, by Ralf Scheidhauer and Michael Mehl, the Emacs major mode for the Oz programming language.