Distel

If you want to have a powerful interface between Emacs and Erlang, check out Distel mode. Distel (short for Distributed Emacs Lisp) extends Emacs Lisp to be able to speak to an Erlang node in a way very similar to Ruby or Python, as shown in Appendix C.

The Distel package can be found at http://fresh.homeunix.net/~luke/distel/ and downloaded from there.

When starting up Distel, you need to tell it which node to talk to. It will prompt you for a node name, which can be in the form node@host or just node if it is local. Once you have given Distel a node name it will continue to use that node unless you prefix a command with C-u node-name.

Distel supports a number of features to make coding Erlang in Emacs easier. First of all, it supports completions of modules and functions by hitting M-?. It also allows you to load and evaluate Erlang code from the minibuffer. To load a module, use C-c C-d L and Distel will prompt you for the module name. Distel also features some pretty fancy refactoring tools.