Emacs for Rust Development

Emacs > Visual Studio Code

There’s a good chance I’m a hater or that I don’t know what I’m doing. After a couple of hours trying to set up VS Code for Rust development, I ended up frustrated not understanding how to simply call the compiler or the debugger from the interface. I looked for rust-mode on Github and 15 minutes later I was up and running on Emacs. Maybe it’s my previous experience with Go development set ups that made it all quite simple.

Rust on Emacs

I approached this the same way I approached Go: let’s get regular syntax highlighting, linting, formatting, and compiling first and we’ll worry about debuggers later. I’m a bit old school when it comes to approaching debugging.nWe end up with the following on the Emacs config:

(use-package rust-mode
  :defer t
  :ensure t
  :init(
    add-hook 'rust-mode-hook(lambda() (setq indent-tabs-mode nil)))
(setq rust-format-on-save t)
(add-hook 'rust-mode-hook(lambda() (prettify-symbols-mode)))
(add-hook 'rust-mode-hook #' lsp)
  :bind(("M-," . rust-compile)))

(use-package flycheck-rust 
:ensure t
:hook
(flycheck-mode-hook .
flycheck-rust-setup))