Sweep is an embedding of SWI-Prolog in Emacs. It provides an interface for executing Prolog queries and consuming their results from Emacs Lisp. Sweep further builds on top of this interface and on top of the standard Emacs facilities to provide advanced features for developing SWI-Prolog programs in Emacs.
Some of the main benefits that Sweep brings to working with Prolog code in Emacs are:
- Semantic highlighting
- Automatic indentation
- Structural editing and navigation
- Jumping to predicate definitions and references
- On-the-fly diagnostics
- Intelligent code completion
- Refactoring support
- Integrated SWI-Prolog top-level
- Ability to run Prolog queries directly from Emacs Lisp
These features and others, along with many options that Sweep provides for you to customize its behavior, are documented in the Sweep manual.
Installing Sweep requires:
- Emacs 27 or later, and
- SWI-Prolog 8.5.18 or later.
Sweep is available from NonGNU ELPA, to install it simply type in
Emacs M-x package-install RET sweeprolog RET.
Note that in Emacs prior to version 28, you need to explicitly enable NonGNU ELPA by adding something like the following to your Emacs configuration:
(with-eval-after-load 'package
(add-to-list 'package-archives '("nongnu" . "https://elpa.nongnu.org/nongnu/")))
To upgrade Sweep to a newer version, do M-x package-upgrade sweeprolog RET.
After installing the sweeprolog Elisp library, load it into Emacs:
(require 'sweeprolog)
Sweep tries to find SWI-Prolog by looking for the swipl executable
in the directories listed in the Emacs variable exec-path. When
Emacs is started from a shell, exec-path is initialized from the
PATH environment variable which normally includes the location of
swipl in common SWI-Prolog installations. If the swipl executable
cannot be found via exec-path, you can tell Sweep where to find it
by setting the variable sweeprolog-swipl-path to point to it:
(setq sweeprolog-swipl-path "/path/to/swipl")
All set! You can now use Sweep for Prolog development and for integrating Prolog into your Emacs Lisp code. For a full description of the different features of Sweep, see the Sweep manual.