Neocaml – Rubocop Creator's New OCaml Mode for Emacs

riffraff · 2026-03-02T11:24:28 1772450668

I think Bozhidar's other projects[0][1][2] are more relevant as "credentials" for an Emacs mode, although probably more niche :)

[0] Projectile, a project mode https://github.com/bbatsov/projectile

[1] Cider, a clojure mode https://github.com/clojure-emacs/cider

[2] Prelude https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude

mark_l_watson · 2026-03-02T14:22:39 1772461359

Good projects. I have only used Clojure professionally for about 2 years out of the last 15 years but I lived in Cider.

When I bought my new laptop a few months ago I consciously and purposefully refused to install VSCode, just improved my Emacs setup for all writing and programming - and I have been happier for it.

eduction · 2026-03-02T15:57:03 1772467023

For context for those not aware, CIDER is probably the #1 Clojure repl in terms of popularity for day to day work.

kleiba · 2026-03-02T12:06:57 1772453217

Aren't there specific IDEs for OCaml like for more mainstream languages?

avsm · 2026-03-02T12:30:34 1772454634

I just use the OCaml Platform VSCode extension: (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ocamllab...) or the OCaml LSP server: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-lsp in other editors and don't really need anything domain specific.

ecshafer · 2026-03-02T14:36:41 1772462201

Vim/Emacs/Sublime (And now things like VSC/Helix) are more than sufficient for coding without an IDE. Autocomplete scripts, the terminal, build scripts, etc work great. Now with LSP you can turn any editor into an IDE pretty trivially.

nesarkvechnep · 2026-03-02T13:39:23 1772458763

You answered it yourself. More mainstream languages have specific IDEs and OCaml is not more mainstream.

kstrauser · 2026-03-02T15:47:05 1772466425

What’s the specific Rust IDE?

jhck · 2026-03-02T17:15:01 1772471701

There is RustRover from JetBrains.

beanjuiceII · 2026-03-02T14:01:23 1772460083

great news Bozhidar always makes fantastic stuff

jasperry · 2026-03-02T15:06:34 1772463994

I was satisfied with Tuareg + Merlin for OCaml development in Emacs, it just worked for me and didn't break when I upgraded packages, but yes, this being from bbatsov is a strong incentive to try it out. My only concern is that it uses tree-sitter, which I try to avoid because of the messiness of the JavaScript ecosystem.

natrys · 2026-03-02T16:39:39 1772469579

I think tree-sitter's relationship with JavaScript is entirely syntactic. You don't need any JS runtime installed to write grammars, because technically tree-sitter CLI already has a JS runtime included and using that it converts your grammar first to an intermediate JSON format, then it generates parser code in C. And then this C code gets compiled into a shared library, which is what editors like Emacs use, so to use tree-sitter modules you definitely don't need a JS runtime either.