Trying to use McCLIM

[Daniel Kochmański]

Hello Craig,

Craig Lanning writes:

> Gentlemen,
>
> I have been writing CLIM apps for years. I've use Symbolics CLIM and
> LispWorks CLIM. Code moves back and forth between these two with little
> difficulty. In the past when I tried McCLIM, I couldn't make it work.
>
> I just tried it again. Is there a way to determine which version of
> McCLIM was loaded by QuickLisp?  I tried it in both Clozure CL and
> SBCL. Neither worked, but each exhitited a different failure.

I'm glad to hear that you've tried it again. I expect that there is
easier way to check the Quicklisp version, but if you look into the file
quicklisp-directory/dists/quicklisp/releases.txt and search for a string
mcclim you'll see something like this:

-- cut --
mcclim http://beta.quicklisp.org/archive/mcclim/2019-07-10/mcclim-20190710-git.tgz ...
-- cut --

You can see there that it is a version cloned at 2019-07-10. Canonical
repository is https://github.com/McCLIM/McCLIM/ so if you want to ensure
the newest version clone it to your local-projects directory (or to
one of asdf registory directories).

>
> SBCL compiles and loads my code. When I start the app, once it displays
> the frame, the command menus show up in the menu bar, but they won't
> pop down.
>
> Clozure CL compiles and loads my code. When I start the app, once it
> displays the frame, while the command menus will pop down, all of the
> items in the menu are grayed out, except the divider entries.

I can reproduce the result you've mentioned for CCL on SBCL. Note that I
had to make changes to your code since it didn't run
(:redisplay-function argument should be :display-function and a function
name typo s/display-detail/display-details/). I didn't change anything
else so far.
>
> I also noticed that for both SBCL and Clozure CL, McCLIM had no support
> for Palettes. It failed when my code called make-palette and frame-
> manager-palette.

McCLIM implements CLIM II specification which doesn't specify what
palettes are.
>
> The app is just a toy that I want to use as the example for a book that
> I am writing about using CLIM.
>
> I have attached a zip file of the source code. With the code unzipped,
> you can compile and load the app by loading system.lisp into your lisp
> environment. Its a fairly simple file to compile and load the files for
> the app.
>
> Once the app is loaded you can start it by typing the form
> 	(cb:run-class-browser)
>

I've started the application (as noted above). If nobody replies during
the weekend about why menu commands seem to be disables I'll try to
debug it on Monday.
> Incidently, it would be helpful if there was a feature symbol that was
> unique to McCLIM. So that I could distinguish between running in McCLIM
> and some other CLIM.

As it happens such feature symbol exists, it is `:mcclim'.
>
> Craig

Best regards,
Daniel

--
Daniel Kochmański ;; aka jackdaniel | Przemyśl, Poland
TurtleWare - Daniel Kochmański      | www.turtleware.eu

"Be the change that you wish to see in the world." - Mahatma Gandhi