5.10 Using an External Editor

GPS is integrated with a number of external editors, in particular Emacs and vi. The choice of the default external editor is done in the preferences. See The Preferences Dialog. The following values are recognized:

gnuclient

This is the recommended client. It is based on Emacs, but needs an extra package to be installed. This is the only client that provides a full integration in GPS, since any extended lisp command can be sent to the Emacs server.

By default, gnuclient will open a new Emacs frame for every file that is opened. You might want to add the following code to your .emacs file (create one if needed) so that the same Emacs frame is reused every time:

             (setq gnuserv-frame (car (frame-list)))

See http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/ange/gnuserv/home.html for more information.

emacsclient

This is a program that is always available if you have installed Emacs. As opposed to starting a new Emacs every time, it will reuse an existing Emacs session. It is then extremely fast to open a file.

emacs

This client will start a new Emacs session every time a file needs to be opened. You should use emacsclient instead, since it is much faster, and makes it easier to copy and paste between multiple files. Basically, the only reason to use this external editor is if your system doesn't support emacsclient.

vim

Vim is a vi-like editor that provides a number of enhancements, for instance syntax highlighting for all the languages supported by GPS. Selecting this external editor will start an xterm (or command window, depending on your system) with a running vim process editing the file.

Note that one limitation of this editor is that if GPS needs to open the same file a second time, it will open a new editor, instead of reusing the existing one.

To enable this capability, the xterm executable must be found in the PATH, and thus is not supported on Windows systems. Under Windows systems, you can use the custom editor instead.

vi

This editor works exactly like vim, but uses the standard vi command instead of vim.

custom

You can specify any external editor by choosing this item. The full command line used to call the editor can be specified in the preferences (see custom editor command).

none

No external editor is used, and the contextual menus simply won't appear.

In the cases that require an Emacs server, GPS will try several solutions if no already running server was found. It will first try to spawn the glide environment distributed with GNAT. If not found in the PATH, it will then start a standard Emacs. The project file currently used in GPS will be set appropriately the first time Emacs is spawned. This means that if you load a new project in GPS, or modify the paths of the current project, you should kill any running Emacs, so that a new one is spawned by GPS with the appropriate project.

Alternatively, you can reload explicitly the project from Emacs itself by using the menu Project->Load

In the preferences, there are three settings that allow you to select the external editor (if left to an empty string, GPS will automatically select the first editor available on your system), to specify the custom editor command, in case you've selector this item, and whether this editor should always be used every time you double-click on a file, or whether you need to explicitly select the contextual menu to open the external editor.