helm-ros

helm-ros is an Emacs package that interfaces ROS with the helm completion facilities. With it you can access launchfiles, nodes, service definitions, and many other things easily. Above all that helm-ros allows you to start ROS processes and gives you some other goodies to facilitate your ROS development in C++.

Screencap

Installation

Setting up the environment variables

First you have to make sure that Emacs can access the ROS environment variables. If you followed the ROS installation procedure and activated these variables inside your .bashrc file, you have to start Emacs from the terminal. If you do not want to start Emacs from the terminal, you have to set the ROS environment variables in you .profile file instead, by adding

source /opt/ros/VERSION/setup.bash

to your .profile file. One other way to do this is to tell Ubuntu to add these variables in every shell by running

$ sudo ln -s /opt/ros/VERSION/setup.sh /etc/profile.d/

You have to repeat the same procedure for you catkin workspaces. You could add

source /path/to/your/catkin/workspace/devel/setup.sh

to you .profile file so that helm-ros can access your project files.

Getting the source

You can either clone this repository and add it to your load-path, or get it through MELPA.

Configuration

Add require 'helm-ros to your configuration.

Somme keybindings are provided with the package. You can enable them by adding (global-helm-ros-mode t) in your config file.

Keybindings

By default, helm-ros binds the following keys.

• C-x C-r h. Starts helm-ros with all available sources.
• C-x C-r m. Start a roscore.
• C-x C-r i. Invalidate helm-ros cache (if you create a new file).

ros-process-mode

In ros-process buffers, you can use the following keybindings.

• c. Interrupts the ROS process associated with the buffer.
• k. Kills the ROS process associated with the buffer.
• q. Closes the buffer.

FAQ

What is the difference between helm-ros and rosemacs?

rosemacs is an older package for ROS programmers using Emacs. Usually it is packaged with ROS itself, although there is no package available for ROS Kinetic.

helm-ros is pure Emacs LISP code, which means that it can be delivered through melpa. rosemacs cannot be delivered that way because it contains common LISP code used to interface emacs with the LISP tools of ROS.

On the other hand helm-ros has a smaller set of features than rosemacs. You might be better off using that package if you code ROS in LISP.

Finally helm-ros is also available in a spacemacs layer, so if you are a spacemacs user you might be better off with this package.