dyalog-mode for GNU Emacs

[harsman]

I just published dyalog-mode, a major mode for GNU Emacs. If you ever edit or view Dyalog APL source in Emacs, you'll probably find it useful.

It currently supports basic syntax highlighting and indentation. It doesn't actually parse the code, but relies on somewhat hacky regular expressions to do its job, so it isn't perfect but it works well enough.

I and several of my colleagues use Emacs to view diffs of source code changes and dyalog-mode gives us syntax highlighting, better diffs due to it's built in lexer, and automatic indentation when making small edits during merges.

To install, just download dyalog-mode.el and place it somewhere in your load path. Then add something like the following to your Emacs init file:

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(autoload 'dyalog-mode "dyalog-mode" "Edit Dyalog APL" t)
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.apl\\'" . dyalog-mode))
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.dyalog$" . dyalog-mode))


If you use Ediff to view diffs of Dyalog APL source code (e.g from some sort of SCM like SVN, Git or Mercurial), you can get dyalog-mode to lex the source. It does a better jobb than Ediff's generic lexer which leads to better diffs. Add something like this to your Emacs init file:

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(autoload 'dyalog-ediff-forward-word "dyalog-mode" "Dyalog mode" t)
(setq ediff-forward-word-function 'dyalog-ediff-forward-word)


If you don't use Emacs, dyalog-mode probably isn't for you.