johnhooks / jove

An Emacs JavaScript Editing Mode

By Jove! Yet Another JavaScript Editing Mode

About

This project is an attempt to create a new JavaScript editing mode for Emacs.

Jove includes a striped down port of the Acorn parser in order to provide complex highlighting and indentation functionality.

Inspiration

• parse-js written in Common Lisp by Marijn Haverbeke
• CodeMirror
• Acorn
• UglifyJS
• js2-mode

Reading on JavaScript Parsers

• Implementing a Syntax-Highlighting JavaScript Editor—In JavaScript By Marijn Haverbeke
• Acorn: yet another JavaScript parser By Marijn Haverbeke
• How to implement a programming language in JavaScript By Mihai Bazon

Installation

Jove is still a work in progress. Though if you want to check it out, clone this repository, add it to your load-path and then require it. Optionally if you think its pretty cool, add it as the default mode for JavaScript.

(add-to-list 'load-path (expand-file-name "elisps/jove"
                                          user-emacs-directory))
(require 'jove)
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.js$" . jove-mode))

Reasoning

Shear madness.

After getting frustrated in an attempt to modify the indentation code of js.el, I concluded a simple* syntax parser would provide a more complete understanding of the code for editing purposes. Plus I needed something to do in my spare time.

* ha, ha, ha…

Working

The functions of the lexer are complete and tested. The parser functions are mostly complete and untested. I have been performing informal tests of the parser with Underscore and JQuery, it seems to be parsing everything correctly.

Goals

• JSX indentation is currently non-functional. The biggest hurdle is combining the legacy indentation code from js-align and newer AST funcationality. The end goal is to base all indentation off the AST, meanwhile I want a solution that can use either method.
• Auto-pairing of JSX tags.
• Highlighting of JSX tag pairs.