diary at Telent Netowrks

I'm sorry about this, I really am#

Thu, 24 Jun 2004 22:44:25 +0000

  1. lisp from time to time, and people keep asking questions. Therefore, in the hope of saving myself some time later I will now run through the FAQ list (where A stands for Anticipated as much as it does Asked):

  1. There is no code yet.

  2. It's not an emacs clone. It won't run elisp. If you want to run gnus, run it in emacs.

  3. Initially I plan to use raw CLX, but the display backend should be reasonably loosely coupled.

  4. We expect the Lisp implementation to convert from external streams to characters, so it'll do Unicode to the same extent as the Lisp does

  5. But with that in mind, I'm using SBCL to develop, so "8 bit clean" is about the best you can hope for for the moment.

  6. It's not a structure editor per se - input files are streams of characters - but let's recognise that most files most of the time are conventionally treated as though they have more structure than this (I hear the usual term is "parsed" ;-) and provide structure-sensitive operations. But allow the user to do structure-violating operations (deleting close parentheses, etc) without immediately going ape.

  7. Some kind of free license (undecided yet). Would like to avoid anything contagious to other unrelated stuff in the same image, and ideally even to allow people to write non-free extensions on the "rinse platform" ("washboard?") but if there's any way despite that to prevent people from taking the whole thing and turning it into their proprietary Lisp development environment without sending "core" enhancements back (a la Hemlock => LW IDE) I'm all ears. Well, at least I'm vaguely interested; it's not a pressing concern and I may well just end up with ye trusty MIT-style do-what-thou-wilt licence.

  8. Intending to port the SLIME frontend so that all the stuff in SWANK is available for debugging/developing user code in a second image.

  9. Working (and crash-proof, unlike Emacs or anything else using xlib) support for popping up windows on more than one display at once.

  10. Better attention paid to the social niceties of X than FSF Emacs does. Yesterday I found myself having to paste from Emacs into xterm into Mozilla, because for some reason I couldn't transfer accented characters from Emacs to Mozilla directly.

  11. There is no code yet.

  12. I amn writing this instead of rectifying that omission.

  13. Therefore I should stop.