[slime-devel] Re: Towards 1.0?

[Bill_Clementson at peoplesoft.com]

Luke Gorrie <luke at bluetail.com> writes:

> Helmut Eller <e9626484 at stud3.tuwien.ac.at> writes:
> > Are there any features we can remove?  I was going to suggest removing
> > the REPL (because the code is messy and a REPL is not the Emacs way to
> > interact with anything), but I guess people wouldn't like that :-)
>
> Amazingly I find myself using the REPL all the time, even though I
> never use IELM for Emacs Lisp. I'm not sure why.

I also use the REPL all the time and wouldn't like to see it removed. In
fact, my normal modus operandi is to jump between source window and REPL,
sometimes evaluating sexp's in the source window, sometimes evaluating them
in the REPL. Generally, the one-off testing stuff is in the REPL; however,
there are often times when I want to step through chunks of code from a
source buffer in the REPL and "tweak" the code before it is executed. for
that, I use the following function:

(defun slime-present ()
  (interactive)
  (setq *presentation-buffer* (current-buffer))
  (global-set-key [f9]
              (lambda ()
                (interactive)
                (set-buffer *presentation-buffer*)
                (forward-sexp)
                (let ((end (point))
                    (beg (save-excursion
                         (backward-list 1)
                         (point))))
                  (copy-region-as-kill-nomark beg end)
                  (set-buffer (slime-output-buffer))
                  (unless (eq (current-buffer) (window-buffer))
                  (pop-to-buffer (current-buffer) t))
                  (goto-char (point-max))
                  (yank)
                  (slime-reindent-defun)
                  (delete-other-windows)))))

This is also useful when I want to give a "slide show" type of presentation
of some lisp code or when I want a "clean" REPL session (e.g. -- if I want
to post it later to my weblog). So, to reiterate, I LIKE THE REPL. :-)

> > Any outstanding keybinding wars?  A while ago we talked about grouping
> > documentation commands under C-c C-d; I like that idea.
>
> Agree. We should also move hyperspec-lookup so that `C-c C-h' does the
> default action of listing all bindings starting with C-c, and move the
> funky-indentation C-M-q command because it's different to the standard
> indentation command on that binding (does a whole defun, not sexp at
> point).

While on the subject of the "grouping" commands, one personal little
nitpick that I have is that I don't like the "C-c C-w m" type "grouped"
commands. I find that it is easier (and less error prone) for me to type
"C-c C-w C-m" instead of "C-c C-w m" because I don't have to lift my finger
off the control key to press the m. This was something that we had a number
of discussions about among the ILISP developers a while back and the
general consensus was in support of the 3-control key sequence. What do
others think about this?

- Bill