[climacs-devel] How stable & useful is Climacs?

[Larry Clapp]

Hello, Climacsers,

First some background about me (if you don't care, skip to the
question at the bottom):

I've used vi and Vim since 1991.  The more I use Lisp, the more I want
to use an editor that understands it.  And yet I have what I guess
boils down to a prejudice against Emacs.

With Brad Beveridge, I did some work on integrating Lisp into Vim.
Jim Bailey linked ECL with Vim directly, and then Brad did some work
reimplementing some of Slime into Vim.  When Brad defected to the
Emacs camp, I took a look at Vim & Slime, and like Brad, I quickly
became unhappy with the Vim internals.  The more I looked at it, the
more I realized that Emacs was really the way to go, if I wanted an
editor scriptable in Lisp.

But I'd rather use something scriptable in *Common* Lisp.  And I tend
to think that an "immersion" approach would be best: swear off Vim and
use the new editor for all tasks (including work, if possible).

And so my question: how useful is Climacs as a code editor for
non-Lisp languages, specifically shell script and Perl?  Does Climacs
(or McClim) have a "shell mode"?  How well documented is it, from the
point of view of someone almost completely unfamiliar with Emacs?

I'm not adverse to reading code, and certainly not to writing some,
either.  But how many of you, for example, use Climacs as your
day-to-day editor for most tasks?

Thank you for your time!

-- Larry Clapp