rversteegen / fb-mode

Emacs mode for the FreeBASIC programming language

FreeBASIC mode for GNU Emacs

This is an Emacs major mode for the FreeBASIC programming language. It's functional, fairly bug-free (except missing keywords), but always a work in progress. It is written from scratch, so may not follow certain conventions.

Installing

require it after downloading it and placing it in your load-path. E.g. in your .emacs:

(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/fb-mode")  ; Directory containing fb-mode.el
(require 'fb-mode)

You likely will want to customise the fb-emph-face (used for : and _ tokens - I couldn't find an existing suitable face) for your colour theme.

Features

• Syntax highlighting
  • Declared variable names are highlighted, thanks to parsing of variable declarations and sub/function declarations and header lines instead of simplistic keyword highlighting
• Indentation
  • Full support for lines continued with _
  • Amount of indentation is controlled by the fb-indent-level variable
• Commenting/uncommenting, and fill-paragraph support for comments
• C-c C-h to lookup a symbol/keyword (default under point) in the manual in a web browser tab (note, doesn't handle ambiguous keywords)
  • Supports most tokens like "*", "..." and special cases like "line input #" if you enter them manually
• F5 to run compile, with a suitable default command (fbc <file>, make or scons)
  • compile-mode support for fbc error/warning messages so you can jump to the line
• beginning-of-defun/end-of-defun (C-M-a/C-M-e) support
• C-M-j to split the current line at point (possibly in middle of a string or comment), adding a _ line continuation and indenting.

Not yet included

• Syntax highlighting of builtin functions and types; some keywords like data are also missing.
• Keyword/builtin completion
• Jumping to definitions (tags)
• Menubar items

Alternative

freebasic-mode by z80lives is an older, simpler Emacs mode for FreeBASIC. The two modes are fairly distinct in their feature sets.

freebasic-mode highlights based on a near-complete (though out of date) list of all FB keywords and builtin functions. It has functions/keys to compile and (Unix only) run the file, and menu bar items. However, it currently has no support for line continuations, minimal support for multiline comments (can only highlight them), and suffers various bugs in syntax highlighting and indentation.