Perlbrew, Emacs, Flymake
So I’m a seasoned user of Emacs (I
started using it back to 1999). I’m using it for all things, especially Perl
coding, using the cperl-mode Emacs mode.
Lately, I’ve come to using flymake.
Flymake is a tool in Emacs, which tries to
compile the file you are editing, and displays compilation errors in your
buffer. There is a mode for Perl, so the result is really nice : realtime
syntax checking of the current Perl file you’re editing. It looks like that :
Perl + Emacs + Flymake + PerlBrew
Then comes perlbrew, which allows you to have multiple Perl interpretors installed on your machine, and switching between them easily.
Alas, flymake is not working by default with Perlbrew, as it uses
/usr/bin/perl. So one needs to configure Emacs to recognize various perls
installed via Perlbrew, and tell Flymake to use one of them.
kentaro has made a Perlbrew mode, and explained how to use it with flymake.
However, for various reasons, this Perlbrew mode it doesn’t work well on my machine and Franck ( lumperjaph ) reported similar issues.
So I went on and rewrote a simple Perlbrew mode that would do almost nothing.
It would only play with directories path, to allow you to say where the various
Perlbrew perls are installed, and which one to use. perlbrew-mini.el was
born.
perlbrew-mini.el
Requirements : you need Emacs, a functional perlbrew with at least one Perl installed, and you need Project::Libs.
Then, download perlbrew-mini.el from github, and put it in a place where Emacs will see it.
Then, edit your .emacs so that it contains these lines:
(require 'perlbrew-mini)
;; change to your username below
(perlbrew-mini-set-perls-dir "/home/uername/perl5/perlbrew/perls/")
;; change the version you wish to use
(perlbrew-mini-use "perl-5.12.2")
(require 'flymake)
(defun flymake-perl-init ()
(let* ((temp-file (flymake-init-create-temp-buffer-copy
'flymake-create-temp-inplace))
(local-file (file-relative-name
temp-file
(file-name-directory buffer-file-name))))
(list (perlbrew-mini-get-current-perl-path)
(list "-MProject::Libs" "-wc" local-file)))
)
(add-hook 'cperl-mode-hook (lambda () (flymake-mode t)))
And voilà, Flymake will work with your Perlbrew Perl, as it used to work with the system Perl.
