Distel: Distributed Emacs Lisp

Distel extends Emacs Lisp with Erlang-style processes and message passing, and the Erlang distribution protocol. With this you can write Emacs Lisp processes and have them communicate with normal Erlang processes in real nodes. This makes it easy to write convenient Emacs user-interfaces to Erlang programs, like the debugger depicted here:

Distel Debugger

In addition to the programming extensions, these applications are included in Distel 3.3:

Dynamic TAGS: You can jump from a call like "lists:sort(MyList)" directly to the source code for lists:sort/1 to inspect the definition, and then unwind back to where you came from. You can also jump from strings like "sort/2" as found in export lists. This doesn't need a TAGS file, it talks to an Erlang node to track down the source file based on the location of the beam file.
Debugger: An Emacs front-end to the Erlang debugger. Lets you interpret modules, set breakpoints, and attach to processes and single-step them within Emacs.
Interactive Sessions: Scratchpad buffers where you can define erlang functions and run expressions, like a cross between the Erlang shell and the function-at-a-time definition/testing of Emacs Lisp.
Process List: A pman-style process viewer, for tracing and inspecting the processes running on a node.
Profiler: Front-end to fprof, so that you can enter an Erlang expression in the minibuffer and then browse the results of profiling it.
Online Documentation: Search through documentation automatically scanned out of all Erlang modules ("fdoc".)

.. and much more.

Supported Platforms

Distel has been tested on Linux with GNU Emacs 20.7 and 21.3, and XEmacs 21.1. It has also been tested on GNU Emacs 21 with Windows 2000/XP and Cygwin, though the installation process is currently a little laborious (see README.WIN32 in the distribution.)

Development

Distel has moved in 2007 to Google Code: project Distel. All released versions and repositories on Sourceforge should be considered obsolete!

Documentation

There are three main documents about Distel:

The User Manual [pdf ps.gz], which describes how to use Distel and what commands are available.

The paper Distel: Distributed Emacs Lisp [pdf ps.gz], describing Distel's motivation and workings in detail. This paper was presented at the 2002 Erlang User Conference.

The Reference Manual [pdf ps.gz], describing the Elisp programming interface and some of Distel's internal workings.

A casual user need only read the User Manual. A would-be Distel hacker will probably enjoy the conference paper the most.

Mailing List

There is a mailing list dedicated to Distel, which you can read to track the development (major milestones are also posted to erlang-questions.) Check out the subscription interface, or browse the archives.

Authors

Distel was written by Luke Gorrie, Vladimir Sekissov, David Wallin, Mats Cronqvist, and Martin Björklund.