[climacs-announce] latest progress

[Robert Strandh]

Dear mailing list member, 

We have had another amazing week of Climacs development.  I keep
telling myself that it will slow down very soon now, but that has not
happened yet.  At some point, though, we shall run out of fairly easy
Emacs-like functionality to add, and we probably cannot expect this
rate of progress anymore.  When that will happen, I don't know.  

Here is a list of the progress that has been made this week:

  * Implemented keyboard macros

  * Auto-fill mode
    (thanks to Matthieu Villeneuve)

  * Test for climacs-base
    (thanks to Aleksandar Bakic)

  * Box ajuster gadget for changing size of windows
    [the code is in there but not enabled due to a problem that we
    cannot seem to find]
    (thanks to Nicolas Lamirault)

  * Kill-buffer command
    (thanks to Lawrence Mitchell)

  * Improved on the quit command so that Climacs asks to
    save buffers that need saving

  * Incremental search
    (thanks to Matthieu Villeneuve)

  * Implemented undo and redo

Again, if someone feels like contributing, patches are welcome.
Contributions can be of different kinds such as added functionality
(probably the most gratifying), bug fixes (less so), code factoring,
improvements to the architecture, contributions to the internals
documentation, etc.

There are still some major things to implement.  Lawrence Mitchell is
looking into using regular expressions, and my student project
concerning Common Lisp syntax will soon start.

Aleksandar Bakic is about to commit an alternative implementation of
the buffer protocol based on so-called persistent data structures (in
this context, "persistent" means that all previous states of the
structure are automatically maintained) .  This is interesting because
given that the buffer protocol is fairly well defined, drop-in
replacements should be possible.  It might even be possible to have
several different implementations in parallel, and to choose the one
that is best suited to the editing task at hand.

Take care, 
-- 
Robert Strandh

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Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C
or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden
slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
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