J Mode

Provides font-lock, REPL integration ( via comint ) and a basic help documentation for the J programming language.

Installation

j-mode has been added to the el-get package managment system and can now be installed via the el-get-install function.

To install the project manually fetch the source via git or direct download, place in your load path and load / require normally.

;; Add this to your emacs config
(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/j-mode/")
(autoload 'j-mode "j-mode.el" "Major mode for editing J files" t)

;; Add for detection of j source files if the auto-load fails
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.ij[rstp]$" . j-mode))

J Font Lock

j-mode font-lock provides four new faces for management of the coloring various parts of speech. Those faces are j-verb-face j-adverb-face j-conjunction-face j-other-face. They can be modified like any of the standard built in faces to help meet your need.

(custom-set-face
 '(j-verb-face ((t (:foreground "Red"))))
 '(j-adverb-face ((t (:foreground "Green"))))
 '(j-conjunction-face ((t (:foreground "Blue"))))
 '(j-other-face ((t (:foreground "Black")))))

J Console

Interaction to the j REPL is provided via the comint module. The j-console function starts the REPL session in a new buffer.

The module provides the following key bindings for convenience

• C-c ! Runs the j-console function
• C-c C-l Executes the current line
• C-c C-r Executes the current region
• C-c C-c Executes the current buffer

NB. Java on many Linux systems provides an executable which is sadly named jconsole. This means that there is a good chance j-mode will attempt to start the Java console up instead of the J console when beginning a new REPL session. The easiest fix for this, as I doubt that we can convince the Java packagers to rename their executable, is to set the j-console-cmd variable provided by j-console.el. This can be done either directly or via the custom-set-variables block.

J Help

j-help provides access to the J software vocabulary via two functions j-help-lookup-symbol and j-help-lookup-symbol-at-point. j-help-look-symbol takes one string argument ( generally via the mini-buffer ) which it then looks up. j-help-lookup-symbol-at-point attempts to determine which symbol is under your cursor and then passes that to j-help-lookup-symbol.

The module provides the following key bindings for convenience

• C-c h runs j-help-lookup-symbol
• C-c C-h j-help-lookup-symbol-at-point

License

Copyright (C) 2012-2014 Zachary Elliott

Distributed under the GNU General Public License; see C-h t in emacs to view.