[slime-devel] Re: Putting REPL prompt on the mode line?

[Thomas F. Burdick]

On 12/22/05, Brian Downing <bdowning at lavos.net> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 07:54:10PM -0800, Derek Peschel wrote:
>
> > Do you want to see that kind of prompt in an editor buffer or let the
> > editor take care of it?
>
> In a normal Lisp buffer I agree - its primary purpose is editing the
> file, and interaction with the Lisp is secondary.  Having a
> buffer-package shown on the mode-line works well in that case.  However,
> I think the REPL buffer is a different story - interaction is primary
> there, so I think the prompt works well (for me).

Just making a guess here, I don't think that Derek wants a REPL at all
-- probably something more like an elisp scratch buffer or a Smalltalk
transcript.  SLIME does have a scratch buffer, and I've periodically
hacked a slime-scratch minor mode so I can have multiple scratch
buffers, associated with different packages, and have them associated
with files.  My current slime-scratch doesn't always behave correctly,
but if there's interest, I can clear it with my manager and post it as
a starting point.

For those of us who use rt to do testing, scratch buffers are really
nice, since having a form directly above the printed representation of
its result is almost all you need to write a deftest.