What's a good IDE for Erlang programming?

Question

As far as I know there's Erlang plugin for NetBeans and Eclipse. Which one has the upper hand at the moment?

Are there any other IDE for Erlang which I didnt mention, and how good are they when compare with NetBeans and Eclipse?

Answer 1

Erlang mode in Emacs is the generally recommended IDE.

http://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/tools/erlang_mode_chapter.html

If you just want basic syntax highlighting in Windows I have written a syntax definition for NotePad++ that works well:

http://www.roberthorvick.com/2009/07/08/syntax-highlighing-for-erlang-in-notepad/

There is an Erlang definition for vim that I'm sure Google knows how to find.

I'm sure others have done the same for other editors.

Answer 2

The best IDE for Erlang is Emacs. However, the mode which ships with Erlang isn't the best. Erlware-mode extends it and Distel allows you to use Emacs itself as an Erlang node, enabling some very nice features. See this blog post.

Between plugins for NetBeans (ErlyBird) and Eclipse (ErlIDE), I prefer the Eclipse one. NetBeans at least used to require nightly versions of NetBeans and didn't work properly for me.

Answer 3

I use Erlide on eclipse (http://erlide.sourceforge.net/).

Pros: Syntax highlight, autocompletion and suggestion all work well. During suggest it will display some documentationif available: very useful when exploring a module.

Error and warning annotiations are quick and helpful.

All things considered the user experience is good, especially if you are used to eclipse.

Cons: Erlide can also run your modules, but I find the shell is too clunky to be usable. I always keep a "real" erlang shell open and compile/test my code from there.

There is also a Textmate bundle (google), but I have not tried that yet.

Bye :)

Answer 4

Well, If you have guts you could try my pre-alpha plugin for kdevelop :)

see on http://rantingbits.wordpress.com/ how to build it

Answer 5

erlide or erlybird no longer works on latest eclipse or netbeans .. :(

Answer 6

I use SciTE: http://www.scintilla.org/SciTEDownload.html as I cant be bothered to learn the emacs key combinations, and am to impatient to wait for eclipse to load.

SciTE comes with an Erlang configuration, but it needs to be uncommented in the configuration file.