[Matlab-emacs-discuss] Debugging in emacs is back !

[<dav...@fr...>]

Hi all,

 

First of all, I should probably say that I used to be a huge fan of the old matlab-emacs, back in the days when Matlab was supporting the External Editor Interface… So much so that for many years (probably until 2017) I kept using R2008b which was the last release to support EEI.

 

With the disappearance of EEI, things weren’t quite the same. It was no longer possible to debug within emacs. 

This week however, I decided to check again the latest version of matlab-emacs…. Oh joy !

 

Despite what the matlab-emacs documentation says (https://sourceforge.net/p/matlab-emacs/src/ci/master/tree/README.org), I discovered that debugging *.m files using Emacs as a debugger was possible again ! Add/remove breakpoints, step in and out ! That really made my day !

 

I think this should really be highlighted and advertised; I’m sure lots of people would love to learn it’s possible again !

 

Just a couple of question now.

 

The only thing that seems to be missing is tooltips showing the value of variables as the mouse hovers over the code.

I don’t expect that to happen overnight, but is there any hope ? is it technically possible ?

 

Also, to make previous outputs uneditable in shell/term-mode, I use the trick explained here https://emacs.stackexchange.com/a/2897

Although it fundamentally cohabitates with matlab-shell, there seems to be a number of side effects

 

The first one is that it seems to break (matlab-shell-tab). Instead of popping up a new window with completions, it dumps some stuff in the matlab shell buffer. For example typing ‘test’ TAB brings:

 

>> emacsdocomplete('test')

 

emacs_completions_output =

 

  java.lang.String[]:

    'testcholdout'

    'testckfold'

    'testconsole'

    'testGetInterface'

    'testpointCB'

    'testsort'

    'testsuite'

    'TestAndVerificationAutopilotExample'

 

The second one it seems, is that it breaks the hyperlinks normally created for error messages. For example, with

>> eye([1 1 1])

I now get:

 

<ERRORTXT>

Error using eye

N-dimensional arrays are not supported.

</ERRORTXT>

 

And the third one, is that the first time I step through any file, everything is nice and smooth.

One I quit the debug mode and start another stepping again, it becomes very sluggish.

At every step, emacs generates a message:

 

error in process filter: Text is read-only

 

Can anyone confirm these side effects, and does anyone know how to avoid them ?

If that’s the price to pay to debug in emacs, I am more than happy to renounce using the trick from https://emacs.stackexchange.com/a/2897 😊

 

PS: last note for anybody at Mathworks reading this.

The information found at https://blogs.mathworks.com/community/2009/09/14/matlab-emacs-integration-is-back/ seems a little out of date. For windows users it suggests using:

 

emacsinit('c:/applications/Emacs/lib-src/emacsclient -n');

 

But the current version of emacsinit doesn’t take any arguments….