[newbie] Lispworks -- a better Emacs?
Hello, Lispworksers,
I'm evaluating the possibility of using Lispworks for most of my
system interaction (editing, coding, and shell, though no plans to
replace my mailer or news reader or web browser). I've "admired LW
from afar", if you will, but could never put together a good enough
use-case to buy it, since I don't use Lisp commercially, but adding "a
fully-compiled CL-based multi-threaded CAPI-enabled Emacs-clone" to
the mix pushed me over the edge (possibly in more ways than one :).
Using LW in this way seems about as close as I could get to a Lisp
Machine on my Linux box.
I'm a Vimmer from way back, so the differences with Emacs don't bother
me (and I wouldn't notice them anyway).
I have some questions, if you have some time:
o Does anyone else do this? If not, why not? LW seems to have many
of the benefits of Emacs, with few of the drawbacks -- it's fully
compiled, it's in CL, it's multi-threaded, it has CAPI and CLIM.
The only minuses I can see is that it doesn't have the vast array of
add-ons or vast user community that Emacs has, and it costs a bit
more, which makes it difficult to use on other people's systems.
But if you already have it, why not at least use it on your own
system?
o Do any other major modes exist? I do a lot of Perl and shell script
for work, and wondered if anyone has written major modes for them.
o The LW "remote shell" command uses rsh. How do I change it to use
ssh? Alternatively, how can I get the help system to tell me how to
do that? :)
o You get the source to "the editor" when you get a commercial
license. Is that *only the editor* or the entire Lispworks IDE?
Just curious.
o I have some ideas for making remote system interaction easier.
Basically instead of logging in to a remote system and running a
shell/editor/what-have-you, you'd run an agent on the system, and
get it to run commands for you and send you the output, and send and
receive files more-or-less transparently (for editing and so forth).
Kind of like Swank, only for system interaction instead of Lisp
interaction. Has anyone else done anything like this? Would anyone
be interested in using the code if I get a moderately functional
proof-of-concept put together? (Even if the agent is not written in
Lisp?)
Thank you for your time!
-- Larry Clapp
Re: [newbie] Lispworks -- a better Emacs?
On Apr 9, 2007, at 10:15 AM, Larry Clapp wrote:
> o Does anyone else do this? If not, why not? LW seems to have many
> of the benefits of Emacs, with few of the drawbacks -- it's fully
> compiled, it's in CL, it's multi-threaded, it has CAPI and CLIM.
> The only minuses I can see is that it doesn't have the vast array of
> add-ons or vast user community that Emacs has, and it costs a bit
> more, which makes it difficult to use on other people's systems.
> But if you already have it, why not at least use it on your own
> system?
> o Do any other major modes exist? I do a lot of Perl and shell script
> for work, and wondered if anyone has written major modes for them.
I have written major modes and editor interfaces for SQL and PHP. I
don't throw every editing task at LispWorks because there is already
a lot of good software available. Much of it is free or inexpensive.
While working in LispWorks is fun and I would love to have control
over every little detail, it just is not cost effective to do so.
There are some difficult rules to deal with when your application
uses both CAPI and the editor process.
Take Komodo, for example. It runs on all platforms (it is based on
the Mozilla framework), supports zillions of languages, and has emacs
and other emulations. You can add support for other languages, and
write plugin extensions using the same model as Firefox. There is a
free version now which I think has just about everything the
commercial version has except the debugger and source code control
interface.
I still like my PHP editor better in many ways, but I can't justify
spending weeks or months writing a PHP debugger when I can buy one
for a few hundred dollars.
> o The LW "remote shell" command uses rsh. How do I change it to use
> ssh? Alternatively, how can I get the help system to tell me how to
> do that? :)
Don't know. But making your shell work through and SSH tunnel should
not be too hard.
> o You get the source to "the editor" when you get a commercial
> license. Is that *only the editor* or the entire Lispworks IDE?
> Just curious.
Just the editor source, and not any of the CAPI related parts.
John DeSoi, Ph.D.
http://pgedit.com/
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