Announcing the open sourcing of the Visual Studio Emacs Emulator extension for Visual Studio 2013.
My Personal Journey with Emacs
I first started using Emacs back when I worked for DEC, on the TOPS-10 and TOPS-20 operating systems. Its programming language at that time was TECO, and the name was an acronym for “Editing MACroS”.
Later when I started working on VAX/VMS, James Gosling had already released Gosling Emacs. So once again I was able to reuse all those typing skills. Although now the programming language was Mocklisp.
Finally (somewhere in the early 90’s) I switched over to Gnu Emacs, probably when I was working on a number different Unix systems, and also some of the early versions of Linux (Slackware 3.0).
During my first time at Microsoft (stated in 1996) I was still using Gnu Emacs fairly extensively. For example when C# was first created we did not have any Visual Studio support for it. So I created an Emacs C# mode (cc-mode at that time was not yet ready) so that I could edit my source code and have some basic syntax highlighting. (For an example of an older C# project which builds using a Makefile see my CsLex Project)
I left Microsoft in 2006, but continued to work in a mixed Visual Studio / Emacs mode. During that time my Emacs skills were still very helpful and relevant particularly when working on various Linux installations.
I re-joined Microsoft in 2012 working on the Azure team but was still missing my Emacs key bindings when I had to use Visual Studio for team projects.
History of Emacs Visual Studio Keybindings
Way back in Visual Studio 2008 many of us rejoiced when Microsoft released a set of key bindings that mimicked the key bindings used in Gnu Emacs.
In Visual Studio 2010 the Emacs Keybindings feature was removed from the main product but the Visual Studio team released the key bindings as a Visual Studio extension available in the online Visual Studio Gallery called “Emacs Emulation”.
This made it so that the bindings were still available for developers, like myself, who still used our old keyboard shortcuts. I cannot begin to count the number of times that I would pop up the print screen (Ctrl-P) instead of previous line.
However after the release of Visual Studio 2012 the extension was never updated so many of us delayed converting from VS2010 for as long as we could - waiting for support that never came. Reluctantly most of us just started using VS2012 with it’s default bindings just to get use of the new features.
Additionally knowns issues, several bug reports, or just behavioral oddities were languishing in the online comments section of the extension.
Several folks on the extension comment list suggested ways to backward engineer the content that would allow it to be installed in VS2012. Up to now this has been considered an “acceptable” workaround.
New (and exciting) Microsoft
Just this last fall (2014) under Microsoft’s new CEO’s (Satya Nadella) leadership Microsoft has recently re-engaged with the broader developer community by open sourcing many of our languages and tools. Satya originally joined Microsoft as a Program Manager in the Developer Relations Group and cites that time as strong influencer.
Late last year I changed teams to start with a group called TED (Technical Evangelism and Development). When the opportunity to start a new project came up I asked if we could consider open sourcing the original VS2010 extension. It helped when they considered that the VS2010 extension had over 22,000 downloads.
After tracking down the Visual Studio “owners” and getting all the appropriate legal sign-off this release is finally ready.
Emacs Keys Project
I can now present to you the original Visual Studio Emacs Emulator extension as open source software under the open source MIT License.
Since no one at Microsoft wanted to retain ownership, and I had a somewhat vested interest in making sure this stuff works, I’ve listed myself as the project owner.
I have renamed the project to “EmacsKeys” to more accurately reflect that it is primarily about mapping key bindings although it does support some basic Emacs behaviors (for example kill ring) that did not exist in Visual Studio.
New Work
Initially I’m releasing it exactly as I received it, warts and all. But I’ve added some work items to the list to see if we can actually improve it over time.
If you are interested in working on this project please just: take a fork, dive in, post an issue, etc…