March 23, 2009 - 2:22pm

One thing I really like about the Danger development environment is that they chose not to use XML in their resource files.  I'm a big fan of simple formats for files such as these, formats that are easy to edit with an editor such as emacs.  XML seems to invariably complicate everything and is far harder to read and edit by hand.

Sadly the GUI editor, DRE that Danger provides is far from great, even after learning all the tricks to make it act right it still often corrupts itself or flakes out entirely.  At those times you'll end up back in a text editor to fix things up.

For better or worse I became indoctrunated into emacs at a young impressionable age and have yet to be able to extract myself from it.  Once you wrap your head around kill/yank and its style of navigation it is hard to feel productive editing text in anything BUT emacs.  One other nice thing is that it is highly customizable, so building new modes for strange formats is rather easy.  To that end, we built a major mode for Danger's RSRC format.  This takes care of highlighting all the keywords nicely and just makes editing RSRC files that much easier.

All you have to do is grab our .emacs and you'll be set editing in color coded glory.  Enjoy.

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