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

[Troels Henriksen]

Larry Clapp <larry at theclapp.org> writes:

> Hello, Climacsers,

Hello!

> 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?

There is currently no shell or Perl mode (we call them "syntaxes" in
Climacs), but there is nothing that prevents one from implementing
such a syntax mode (except for the fact that it is currently fairly
hard to do so). There is unfortunately little-to-none documentation
about writing syntax modes, mostly because the current optimal
procedure for doing so (writing a parser and redisplay code by hand)
is not really useful in the long run. Reading the code for the
Fundamental syntax should give an outline of what needs to be
implemented.

> 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?

I know Robert Strandh uses/used Climacs for at least some things, but
most people find the lack of syntaxes or the relative slowness of
Climacs to be unacceptable. Modulo hopefully-solvable performance
issues (which may or may not affect you depending on your hardware),
Climacs is fairly useful for hacking on Common Lisp code.

If you're interested, the McCLIM manual has a section about the editor
substrate used in Climacs ("Drei", adapted from Climacs), it has some
documentation about the used protocols.

-- 
\  Troels
/\ Henriksen