[climacs-devel] Climacs development

[Paolo Amoroso]

Robert Strandh <strandh at labri.fr> writes:

> I am a little ambivalent about Climacs turning in to a fully-featured
> Common Lisp Emacs, because that would mean that, instead of merging
> Goatee and Portable Hemlock, we write a third one.  On the other hand,

I think that having a decent Common Lisp text editor--be it Climacs,
Portable Hemlock, a merge, or something different--would be useful.

There are *now* enough end-user Common Lisp applications, that having
some of them available in the same Lisp image would bring part of the
integration power of Lisp Machine environments to our *current*
systems--with the added benefit of using Common Lisp as a scripting
language for free.

For example, the Mel email program could call Climacs/Portable
Hemlock/whatever to edit messages, in a way similar to Unix
applications calling the user's preferred editor via $EDITOR.

This could be done by providing protocols for accessing basic editing
functionality such as loading a file in a buffer, placing the cursor
at a specified location, getting back the edited text as a string,
etc.

Such a protocol would not need to be huge and expose all the
functionality, just a minimal set of widely available features that
may make it possible to use different editors in a more or less
uniform way.

This thin abstraction layer needs not be tied to Climacs or Portable
Hemlock, it could well be a different project.


> Well, that's just what I can think of right now.  Please do not
> hesitate adding to this list as you see fit.  Oh, and if you plan to

All the standard disclaimers apply: this is just brainstorming, I'm
not working on this, it's not even vaporware, etc.


Paolo
-- 
Why Lisp? http://alu.cliki.net/RtL%20Highlight%20Film