12 KiB
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 runraco 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 runraco 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 nameapp-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.