[climacs-devel] Re: Climacs group stuff

[Troels Henriksen]

John Q <splittist at yahoo.com> writes:

> A couple of suggestions (sorry for doing it like this, but I'm going
> be away from my dev machine and irc for another 10 days at this
> rate):
>
> 1. Search and replace commands. Suggest new commands "Group Query
> Replace" and "Group Query Replace From Buffer" (which could
> optionally prompt for a Group) which would do the appropriate
> command on each buffer in the group in series.

This is not necessary in the current implementation - basically,
because Climacs *always* has an "active buffer" (though this is hidden
from the user) - when the user deselects the active buffer, what
actually happens is that a special group, that always designates the
current buffer, will be selected. This means that commands such as
Query Replace can elegantly be written to always act on the buffers of
the active group, which will simply be the current buffer in the case
where the user is not interested in performing group operations. Thus,
we remove the need for multiple commands that have only differences,
which means that we do not need seperate gestures for group and
non-group operations.

> (Eventually this leads to Possibilities Buffers à la Zmacs.)

What are these? I must admit that I have never used Zmacs, the
inspiration for the group concept came from Hemlock.

> 2. System groups. Query an ASDF system for its
> component files to use as a group.

Yes! This would be very cool.

> (Also treat a file or buffer as a list of filenames/pathnames to
> establish a group; allow someone to write a TAGS file parser to get
> the names of files for a group, etc.)

This would indeed also be quite useful, yes.

-- 
\  Troels "Athas"
/\ Henriksen