[climacs-devel] More ideas for gardeners

[Robert Strandh]

Derek Peschel writes:
 > 
 > If I were choosing development projects, they might be:
 > 
 > 	- Taking advantage of Climacs's parsing to do more than just
 > 	  coloring files.

This is already the case to some extent with Swine, at least for
Lisp.  We do navigation, indentation, compilation, CLHS lookup, etc. 

 > 	  So Climacs could be aware of the regular-expression language
 > 	  and color expressions as they are being typed.  

Not sure what you mean here, but Climacs does not rely on regular
expressions for syntax highlighting.  It uses a parser capable of
doing LR parsing which is more powerful than regular expressions.  And
it updates the parse tree as you type, so the syntax highlighting
should be up to date as you type. 

 > 	  We also have two LISP syntaxes, probably with different
 > 	  strengths and weaknesses.  Is that a good idea?

No, cl-syntax should probably be ditched, but I would like to keep it
around until lisp-syntax can be generated from a grammar. 

 > 	  A Climacs with few assumptions about commands would
 > 	  be useful.  Thinking about various editors also forces
 > 	  developers to think about use cases (something that is
 > 	  almost completely missing from GNU Emacs).  It might also be
 > 	  nice to allow radical key rebindings at runtime.

This would be a good thing, but I think it is lower priority than most
other things.  For now, it is probably OK for most people who need to
rebind keys and to alter commands to do so "manually".

 > 	- Fixing Climacs's weak points: lack of speed, lack of
 > 	  developer documentation, incorrect calculation of the cursor
 > 	  position, and probably others.

I would go for correctness before speed.  On both my laptop and my
desktop machines, it is almost fast enough as it is, so I don't see
speed as terribly important to work on right now

-- 
Robert Strandh

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