[mcclim-devel] getting started...

[Perry E. Metzger]

"Peter Scott" <sketerpot at gmail.com> writes:
> On 2/21/07, Perry E. Metzger <perry at piermont.com> wrote:
>> Pardon the utterly naive newbie question, but I'm brand new to
>> McClim, have never used ASDF (and barely understand what it is),
>> etc.
>
> Welcome!

Thanks for the assistance.

A few notes:

1) The section of INSTALL that describes demos is very strangely
   formatted - way more than 80 column lines, and if you more the file
   out in an xterm everything you need to type in is more than one
   line so you can't cut and paste the stuff in. That's the only part
   of the file that is messed up in this manner.
2) It would be cool if you could pop up a "master demo window". When
   tcl/tk was still new and exciting, there was a single app you could
   launch that would let you walk through a large set of interesting
   demos.
2) I popped up a Clouseau window, and (being ignorant) tried to do a
   few things like, say, expanding the bottom pane with the usual
   modern method of clicking and dragging on the frame between the
   panes. No dice -- such a thing doesn't work. In the address book
   demo, you can't tab between entry fields.
   I recognize that the UI is very much in the image of the lisp
   machine, but in the intervening 25 years since Genera was state of
   the art the "common expectations" of the naive user community have
   changed -- at the very least, it might be useful if there was a
   short document explaining to a user what the expectations of the UI
   they're using are (though perhaps ultimately it might be valuable
   to make the UI feel a bit more like what people are now used to.)

> Second, you would be well advised to install emacs and SLIME if you
> don't have them already. Both are available in the Ubuntu package
> repository, so you can install them the same way you installed SBCL.

I'm an old Emacs user so that was the first thing I install on any box
I set up. However, I've yet to play much with SLIME -- is there an
intro to SLIME somewhere?

> Next, you'll need to download McCLIM and set it up. The easist way for
> you to do this would probably be to open SBCL and enter the following
> lines of Lisp code:
>
> (require :asdf-install)
> (asdf-install:install :mcclim)

That's rather neat. It downloads and installs mcclim pretty much on
its own. Is there an asdf web page that explains how the whole thing
works and what it can do?


-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry at piermont.com