Using Emacs and IDLWAVE with Mac OS X

IDLWAVE is a plug-in to the Emacs text editor that provides an alternative to the IDLDE development environment. A native aqua build of Emacs is now available that includes IDLWAVE. This article discusses the basic information needed to get started using Emacs and IDLWAVE on Mac OS X.

NOTE: The information in this article is provided for the convenience of our customers. Exelis VIS does not maintain or support the IDLWAVE package for Emacs. For additional information and trouble-shooting assistance resources, please visit the IDLWAVE website at http://www.idlwave.org. Information about GNU Emacs and Xemacs can be found at http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ and http://www.xemacs.org/.

Download the correct version of Emacs for your version of Mac OS X from the following:

• OS X Jaguar 10.2: http://emacsformacosx.com/
  

and run the installer.

After Emacs has been installed, an icon for it will be placed in the Applications folder. Double click this icon to start Emacs.



Once Emacs is running, open an IDL .pro file by choosing Open File from the File menu or by using the key sequence Control-X, Control-F.



At the bottom of the Emacs window, type in the full path to the .pro file you wish to open after the Find file: prompt. It will start by default in your home directory '~/'.



After the file is open in Emacs, choose Syntax Highlighting from the Options menu. This will turn on Syntax Highlighting making the code a bit easier to read.



Now start an interactive IDL Shell by choosing Start IDL Shell from the Debug menu or by using the key sequence Control-C, Control-S.

NOTE: In order to run an IDL shell from within Emacs it is assumed that you will have IDL 5.6 installed and have symbolic links created in /usr/local/bin. There is an option to do this during installation, but it can also be done after the installation by running the $IDL_DIR/bin/install script. If for some reason you do not wish to create symbolic links in/usr/local/bin, you will need to specify the path to IDL in your .emacs file. More information about this can be found at http://www.idlwave.org.



Once the IDL shell is started you basically have a full fledged IDE with chromacoding and an interactive help system.




For more information about IDLWAVE please visit http://www.idlwave.org

For more information about Emacs please visit http://emacsformacosx.com/about