Lisp Propulsion Laboratory log

Paolo Amoroso's weblog. Main interests: Lisp, astronomy (Moon), space exploration (Apollo and early manned programs)

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Climacs project making rapid progress

Thursday, September 1, 2005

Bill Clementson blogged about editor customization with Lisp IDEs, and discussed various ways of integrating Emacs with proprietary IDE tools. One such options, which he calls the "Borg Approach", is to enhance an IDE's native editor by taking advantage of source code or APIs/hooks.

I think that, at least for brainstorming purposes, it may be worth mentioning the Climacs implementation of an Emacs-like editor. Among the Emacs implementations written in Common Lisp, it is the one that is making the most rapid progress. Regular progress reports are posted to the development mailing list, and the latest one may mark a significant turning point.

In my opinion, the most important development is that some Climacs features are beginning to be better than equivalent ones in Emacs, most specifically better indentation management in Lisp mode (see the 5th bullet item in the report). Considering that Climacs is also "hackability-friendly" because it is written in -- and can be extended with -- Common Lisp, it is a project worth watching.