Solid Config for webdev in emacs under linux AND windows?

Question

I have a windows laptop (thinkpad) and somewhat recently rediscovered emacs and the benefit that all those wacky shortcuts can be when the arrow keys are located somewhere near you right armpit.

I was discouraged after php-mode, css-mode, etc, under mmm-mode was inconsistent, buggy, and refused to properly interpret some of my files. (In all fairness, I'm most likely doin' it wrong) So I eventually found the nxhtml package which worked pretty well.

However, nxhtml causes weird bugs and actually crashes on certain files (certain combinations of nested modes I supposed) under linux! (using Ubuntu 7.10 and Kubuntu 8.04)

I'd like to be able to work on the laptop as well as the home linux pc without having to deal with inconsistent implementations of something that shouldn't be this hard. I've googled and looked around and there's a good chance I'm the only human on the planet having these problems... Anyone got some advice?

(in lieu of an emacs solutions, a good enough cross-platform lightweight text editor with the dev features would also work I suppose...)

Answer 1

Although I use emacs when I have to (ie. when I'm at the command line), I use Eclipse for all my real development work. If you get the Web Standards Toolkit plug-in for it, it can do syntax coloring, tag auto-completion, and other fun stuff.

Alternatively, if Eclipse is to "heavy" for you, jEdit is another excellent program for doing web development (it has most of it's web dev support built in, but you can also get some additional plug-ins for features like HTML Tidy).

Both programs are open source and Java-based, which means they're both free and run on (virtually) any platform.

Answer 2

Personally, I like mumamo-mode. I'm not sure if you're including that in your problem description, since it does rely on (and is usually downloaded with) nxhtml-mode. So I don't know if you're using mumamo or just some aspect of nxhtml that lets you use multiple modes.

If you're not using mumamo-mode, then I'd recommend trying it. It won't fix your nxhtml issues, but it is a pretty simple way to do editing of multi-mode files (works great for me, for HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, etc.)

Answer 3

You could try mmm-mode and multi-mode. I haven't tried them: I'm happy with nxhtml for now. What sort of problems did you encounter?

Answer 4

Five years after the OP, let me recommend Emacs web-mode.

It has excellent support for combined web documents (html+php+css+js+asp+jsp...). Snippets. Syntax highlighting. Auto-completion. css-colorization. Automatic working indentation. Auto-close tags.

web-mode has completely replaced php-mode/html etc for my daily development.

Easy installation through MELPA.

There is a Github page for reporting issues, which the developer has been very quick to fix.