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Michael
Apr 2nd, 2003 (Updated and reposted from Kuro5hin July 31st, 2004)

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Class Browser

Visual Studio has the class/file/definition browser. Emacs has the speedbar. It's installed by default. Fire up a file in your project once you have your tags loaded (see above for tags tips), and type M-x speedbar.

I haven't had much experience with the speedbar, but it seems pretty usable so far. But then, I don't care for Visual Studio's class browser 90% of the time. I have it off.

Status compared to Visual Studio: The Visual Studio browser seems to be a bit more snappy. I don't appreciate having to double click a file to open it, or the flickery nature of the highlight in speedbar. This may be fixable - like I said, I'm not a big speedbar user in the first place. Speedbar gets points for it's use in all different languages. I still prefer Visual Studio's functionality here. Best interface in town.

Indentation and Code Style Compatibility

There is a small army of coders who dislike some aspect of then default indentation style in Emacs' C/C++ modes. I myself, have been hassled by respectable programmers for using it.

Braces cause a double indentation:~the braces are indented once, and then whatever is past the braces is indented again. This is not a bug, or an oversight - it is the GNU coding style at work. In addition, Visual Studio displays the tabs generated by Emacs by default incorrectly. If you are working with people who have not discovered The One True Editor, you will want to convert your tabs to spaces. In addition, I will throw in a line that shows how to reduce the number of spaces per tab stop in case your code project requires it, and a line that automatically places your cursor at the required indent level instead of the far left of your buffer where you will be needing to press TAB anyhow.

Click here

Status compared to Visual Studio: Emacs does precisely what I want here. I didn't even mention anything about electric braces or anything of that nature, since the object of this document is to help with the jealousy Emacs users feel against Visual Studio 7. Taking Emacs beyond Visual Studio 7's featureset is an exercise left to the reader.

Project-Centric Functionality

The concept of projects and solutions in Visual Studio is central to it's operation. Emacs is not an IDE, but it does play one on TV. I can make Emacs do enough to satisfy my requirements. There is a session management tool for Emacs out there, but I don't really need that. I take a more simple route, of setting a few states within Emacs whenever I approach working on a project. Observe the following code which opens a source file in one of the projects, fires up the speedbar, starts a tags table definition and sets up the environment for compiling a single file in the project here

Status compared to Visual Studio:

Emacs does what I want it to. Visual Studio wins because it's an IDE that works for a single compiler, and there is a ton of raw functionality behind the idea of projects and solutions.

Scrolling

By default in Emacs, when you scroll, you are given what amounts to half a page down when your cursor reaches the end of the screen. If you prefer the smooth scrolling of Visual Studio, you can get it:

(setq scroll-step 1)
(setq scroll-conservatively 50)

Sadly, in Emacs, your cursor always has to be in the screen, to my knowledge. In Visual Studio, you can mouse wheel scroll away from the current editing position, and when you get back to it, your cursor will be where you left it. Emacs waits until your cursor is at the edge of the screen, then it reluctantly drags it along. You are given a choice, however. The following line will make the cursor start scrolling right away:

(setq scroll-preserve-screen-position nil)

Status compared to Visual Studio: Overall, I like the scrolling features in Emacs more, despite the gripe I have above. I like the idea of scroll-margin which allows me to "look before I leap".

What I Haven't Touched On

Visual Studio 7 still excels over Emacs in a number of ways I haven't touched on here. One of the biggest issues in the list is debugging. The idea of stepping through the code, making changes and linking into the running code (a feature that has been there since Visual Studio 6) is something that is best done from the IDE.

Visual Studio also has the Intellisense feature. I am told that this feature can be compared to the functionality of the speedbar, coupled with Emacs packages EIEIO and the Semantic Bovinator. I am okay with the way things are currently, but will definitely be checking these packages out once I become familiar with my current working environment. You can click here to jump ahead of me and learn how this works for yourself, already.

MSDN help. The ability to jump around the MSDN help is better in Visual Studio. I don't use MSDN help in my day to day life. I would be interested to hear what others are doing.

"Reverse" integration, because it's not out there (yet?). There is a plugin for Visual Studio that lets you use Emacs in lieu of the in-IDE editor. You click on a file in the IDE, and Emacs pops up instead of the Visual Studio 6 editor. Here is a link to VisEmacs. It's got nothing to do with Visual Studio 7. The last release was in 2000. And yes, I have tried to see if I could get it to work, and I fell short of success.

Visual Source Safe. I use Subversion and Perforce.

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Michael
Apr 2nd, 2003 (Updated July 31st, 2004)