Blogging Pubbitch

I've been using emacs ever since university (not that long, but long enough) and thought that there must be a neat way to persuade it to help with java development in the same way it copes with C/C++ dev work. For those of you not in the know, emacs and the GNU tool chain combine fairly seamlessly; it's possible to call gcc from within emacs, and then jump to any file and line that reports a compilation problem by just moving the cursor to the right place and hitting return. Very nice.

After a little hunting on google, here's how I now do it:

  M-x compile

When asked for the path to the make command, try

  ant -find build.xml -emacs

I'm using jikes as my compiler, so have to add "build.compiler.emacs" to my ant properties. And that's it. Nice and easy.