acme from scratch

This document is a work in progress, edit it, comment it, &c. This document assumes an already working acme setup.

Installation

The merlin interface for acme is available in opam: opam install merlin-acme. This will install the binaries

• Errors to get a list of the errors in a window,
• TypeOf to get the type of the expressions under the cursor (see section “Known bugs and future work” → “dot”),
• Cplt to get the completion candidates for the identifier under the cursor, and
• Locate to get the location of the definition of an identifier.

Use

Simply add the name of the binaries to the tag of any buffer and middle-click on it. A window named +Merlin will appear with the results returned by merlin.

Known bugs and future work

dot

Completion, location and typing requests are sent to merlin with the start of the dot as the cursor position. In the future, the results will be filtered so that only the expressions with position included in the dot will be shown.

Debug output

The details of the communication with merlin are written by the binaries to their standard output. It pollutes the +Errors window. The development version of the bindings already got rid of that.

Statelessness

The current implementation always sends the content of the whole buffer to a new instance of merlin. In the future, the binaries will keep merlin running and remember the state it's in.