Is there an eclipse plugin for developing in m4?

Question

Googling has turned up little to nothing.

I need to develop some heavy stuff in m4 and I'd love to do it in my favorite environment with all the bells and whistles thereof.

There are packages for running m4 on just about every platform, such as windows. So I know at the very least I can create a default project and test from the CLI. But I'd rather not :)

Answer 1

I'm not aware of any specific editing support for m4. However, if you have some time to spare (!) and the BNF for m4, then you could use Xtext (http://wiki.eclipse.org/Xtext) to create a syntax-coloring and -completing editor, with an outline view.

Answer 2

You can also try colorer for Eclipse (http://colorer.sourceforge.net/eclipsecolorer/) — it almost certainly supports m4 syntax (though I did not check).

Answer 3

If you are familiar with (and like) vim, you could try out Eclim and then setup syntax highlighting for m4.

Answer 4

Unfortunately, just syntax coloring will be of little help - you need something that's capable of interpreting m4 because unless defines are processed you can't tell if it's just a word or a predefined macro. mc (Midnight Commander) has some rudimentary highlighting for m4, you might take a look at that.