Improving Emacs for writing code

[joakim]

Emacs does a lot of things uniquely well, but we can still learn from
other code writing environments how to improve the code writing
experience in Emacs.

These are concrete proposals I'm prepared to invest time in:

- Merge Cedet in Emacs.

Cedet provides many facilities necessary to emulate other modern IDE:s,
for instance language parsers in lisp. I think Cedet is nicely written,
and that it wouldn't be a great problem to merge it if a decision to do
it was reached. I've contributed things to the package and I'm prepared
to help with any grunt work necessary for the merge, for instance
discussing issues from emacs-devel with the packages principal authors.

- Provide some ECB like features in Emacs.

ECB provides the typical IDE workspace view in Emacs, but achieves this
by advising Emacs core functions a lot.

In another thread on this list RMS identified the following core C level
features to be implemented for this feature(slightly edited by me):

---------------
Perhaps the cleanest way is to give each window a plist to specify
whether various operations should consider it.  It could have a:
- `delete-other-windows' property and a
- `select-window' property and a
- `display-buffer' property, and the values of these properties would
control whether those operations can use this window.
(this last one can be postponed, since "dedicted" does the same)

The new `display-buffer' property could be equivalent to the existing
"dedicated" flag.  That would mean it affects some other primitives
aside from `display-buffer', but that is ok.  There is no need to be
rigid about the relationship between these properties and primitives
they affect.
---------------------

I'm interested in working on initially implementing the first 2 flags in
this list. The display-buffer property could be implemented later, since
the current "window dedication" feature does the same.

-- 
Joakim Verona