typesetting/quad/qtest/mds/other-editors.md

Command-Line Tools and Your Editor of Choice

Although DrRacket is the easiest way for most people to start with Racket, many Racketeers prefer command-line tools and other text editors. The Racket distribution includes several command-line tools, and popular editors include or support packages to make them work well with Racket.

1 Command-Line Tools                       
  1.1 Compilation and Configuration: `raco`
  1.2 Interactive evaluation               
  1.3 Shell completion                     
                                           
2 Emacs                                    
  2.1 Major Modes                          
  2.2 Minor Modes                          
  2.3 Packages specific to Evil Mode       
                                           
3 Vim                                      
                                           
4 Sublime Text                             

1. Command-Line Tools

Racket provides, as part of its standard distribution, a number of command-line tools that can make racketeering more pleasant.

1.1. Compilation and Configuration: raco

The raco short for “**Ra**cket **co**mmand” program provides a command-line interface to many additional tools for compiling Racket programs and maintaining a Racket installation.

• raco make compiles Racket source to bytecode.

  For example, if you have a program "take-over-world.rkt" and you’d like to compile it to bytecode, along with all of its dependencies, so that it loads more quickly, then run

    raco make take-over-the-world.rkt

  The bytecode file is written as "take-over-the-world_rkt.zo" in a "compiled" subdirectory; ".zo" is the file suffix for a bytecode file.

• raco setup manages a Racket installation, including manually installed packages.

  For example, if you create your own library collection called "take-over", and you’d like to build all bytecode and documentation for the collection, then run

    raco setup take-over

• raco pkg manages packages that can be installed through the Racket package manager.

  For example, to see the list of installed packages run:

    raco pkg show

  To install a new package named <package-name> run:

    raco pkg install <package-name>

  See [missing] for more details about package management.

For more information on raco, see [missing].

1.2. Interactive evaluation

The Racket REPL provides everything you expect from a modern interactive environment. For example, it provides an ,enter command to have a REPL that runs in the context of a given module, and an ,edit command to invoke your editor as specified by the `EDITOR` environment variable on the file you entered. A ,drracket command makes it easy to use your favorite editor to write code, and still have DrRacket at hand to try things out.

For more information, see [missing].

1.3. Shell completion

Shell auto-completion for bash and zsh is available in "share/pkgs/shell-completion/racket-completion.bash" and "share/pkgs/shell-completion/racket-completion.zsh", respectively. To enable it, just run the appropriate file from your .bashrc or your .zshrc.

The "shell-completion" collection is only available in the Racket Full distribution. The completion scripts are also available online.

2. Emacs

Emacs has long been a favorite among Lispers and Schemers, and is popular among Racketeers as well.

2.1. Major Modes

• Racket mode provides thorough syntax highlighting and DrRacket-style REPL and buffer execution support for Emacs.

  Racket mode can be installed via MELPA or manually from the Github repository.

• Quack is an extension of Emacs’s scheme-mode that provides enhanced support for Racket, including highlighting and indentation of Racket-specific forms, and documentation integration.

  Quack is included in the Debian and Ubuntu repositories as part of the emacs-goodies-el package. A Gentoo port is also available (under the name app-emacs/quack).

• Geiser provides a programming environment where the editor is tightly integrated with the Racket REPL. Programmers accustomed to environments such as Slime or Squeak should feel at home using Geiser. Geiser requires GNU Emacs 23.2 or better.

  Quack and Geiser can be used together, and complement each other nicely. More information is available in the Geiser manual.

  Debian and Ubuntu packages for Geiser are available under the name geiser.

• Emacs ships with a major mode for Scheme, scheme-mode, that while not as featureful as the above options, works reasonably well for editing Racket code. However, this mode does not provide support for Racket-specific forms.

• No Racket program is complete without documentation. Scribble support for Emacs is available with Neil Van Dyke’s Scribble Mode.

  In addition, texinfo-mode included with GNU Emacs and plain text modes work well when editing Scribble documents. The Racket major modes above are not really suited to this task, given how different Scribble’s syntax is from Racket’s.

2.2. Minor Modes

• Paredit is a minor mode for pseudo-structurally editing programs in Lisp-like languages. In addition to providing high-level S-expression editing commands, it prevents you from accidentally unbalancing parentheses.

  Debian and Ubuntu packages for Paredit are available under the name paredit-el.

• Smartparens is a minor mode for editing s-expressions, keeping parentheses balanced, etc. Similar to Paredit.

• Alex Shinn’s scheme-complete provides intelligent, context-sensitive code completion. It also integrates with Emacs’s eldoc mode to provide live documentation in the minibuffer.

  While this mode was designed for R5RS, it can still be useful for Racket development. The tool is unaware of large portions of the Racket standard library, and there may be some discrepancies in the live documentation in cases where Scheme and Racket have diverged.

• The RainbowDelimiters mode colors parentheses and other delimiters according to their nesting depth. Coloring by nesting depth makes it easier to know, at a glance, which parentheses match.

• ParenFace lets you choose in which face font, color, etc. parentheses should be displayed. Choosing an alternate face makes it possible to make “tone down” parentheses.

2.3. Packages specific to Evil Mode

• on-parens is a wrapper for smartparens motions to work better with evil-mode’s normal state.

• evil-surround provides commands to add, remove, and change parentheses and other delimiters.

• evil-textobj-anyblock adds a text-object that matches the closest of any parenthesis or other delimiter pair.

3. Vim

Many distributions of Vim ship with support for Scheme, which will mostly work for Racket. You can enable filetype detection of Racket files as Scheme with the following:

if has("autocmd")
au BufReadPost *.rkt,*.rktl set filetype=scheme endif

Alternatively, you can use the vim-racket plugin to enable auto-detection, indentation, and syntax highlighting specifically for Racket files. Using the plugin is the easiest method, but if you would like to roll your own settings or override settings from the plugin, add something like the following to your ".vimrc" file:

if has("autocmd")
au BufReadPost *.rkt,*.rktl set filetype=racket au filetype racket set lisp
au filetype racket set autoindent
endif

However, if you take this path you may need to do more work when installing plugins because many Lisp-related plugins and scripts for vim are not aware of Racket. You can also set these conditional commands in a "scheme.vim" or "racket.vim" file in the "ftplugin" subdirectory of your vim folder.

Most installations of vim will automatically have useful defaults enabled, but if your installation does not, you will want to set at least the following in your ".vimrc" file:

" Syntax highlighting
syntax on

" These lines make vim load various plugins filetype on
filetype indent on
filetype plugin on

" No tabs!
set expandtab

Indentation

You can enable indentation for Racket by setting both the lisp and autoindent options in Vim. However, the indentation is limited and not as complete as what you can get in Emacs. You can also use Dorai Sitaram’s scmindent for better indentation of Racket code. The instructions on how to use the indenter are available on the website.

If you use the built-in indenter, you can customize it by setting how to indent certain keywords. The vim-racket plugin mentioned above sets some default keywords for you. You can add keywords yourself in your ".vimrc" file like this:

" By default vim will indent arguments after the function name
" but sometimes you want to only indent by 2 spaces similar to
" how DrRacket indents define. Set the lispwords' variable to " add function names that should have this type of indenting.`

set lispwords+=public-method,override-method,private-method,syntax-case,syntax-rules set lispwords+=..more..

Highlighting

The Rainbow Parenthesis script for vim can be useful for more visible parenthesis matching. Syntax highlighting for Scheme is shipped with vim on many platforms, which will work for the most part with Racket. The vim-racket script provides good default highlighting settings for you.

Structured Editing

The Slimv plugin has a paredit mode that works like paredit in Emacs. However, the plugin is not aware of Racket. You can either set vim to treat Racket as Scheme files or you can modify the paredit script to load on ".rkt" files.

Scribble

Vim support for writing scribble documents is provided by the scribble.vim plugin.

Miscellaneous

If you are installing many vim plugins (not necessary specific to Racket), we recommend using a plugin that will make loading other plugins easier. Pathogen is one plugin that does this; using it, you can install new plugins by extracting them to subdirectories in the "bundle" folder of your Vim installation.

4. Sublime Text

The Racket package provides support for syntax highlighting and building for Sublime Text.