Phil Mitchell wrote:
> 
> Thanks, Yoshiki. Yes, you're right, a lot of what I want to do could be done
> in elisp using emacs as the platform, but then I have no way to tie in nice
> gui components, which seems a shame in the 21st century. I've thought about
> using gnuserv, I don't know if that will be flexible enough to be really
> usable. "Reimplement the whole thing" -- I'm not sure what you mean. Emacs?

I think he meant reimplementing all of the functionality of Emacs by rewriting it in Squeak/Smalltalk.  Of course, this would be an enormous task.  (Yoshiki's Option #4, that is.)

But more realistically, you could just implement (in Squeak/Smalltalk) some of the most important text editor features that you want, one at a time, which is much more do-able.  For example, just implementing the basic cursor navigation controls would be fairly easy... (I think someone has probably already done this at some point).  (I guess this is Option #0.)  And many common lisp text processing commands probably already have equivalents in Smalltalk.

Option #3 (truly "plugging in an emacs editor") is probably nearly as huge a task as #4, if you really want to get the various lisp-emacs libraries working.  (This is no fault of Squeak's... it would be no easier to, say, try to get a X-based CAD package to run inside a lisp-emacs environment.)  But, on the other hand, someone (Nishihara Satoshi) has already written a simple Lisp interpreter in Squeak, which you could play around with and try to build off of.  See http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1410 .

(I actually don't consider myself an emacs or lisp guru, although I've used emacs quite a bit.  Perhaps there is some magical way to plug an emacs editor into an ST browser that I'm not thinking of.  Besides, as a general rule there isn't much need for a powerful text-processing editor when editing Smalltalk source code, since you're nearly always dealing with shortish methods, and you have the power of various browser commands.)

One other thing Yoshiki mentioned was a mouse-less Squeak in which all development tools could be used from the keyboard.  This probably wouldn't be too-too difficult, certainly a lot easier than trying to plug a full emacs editor into a browser.  (I mean just using the browsers, inspectors, workspaces, menus from the keyboard... not morph manipulation or drawing or anything that really begs for a mouse.)  You'd need to have a mechanism for switching focus between windows with the keyboard (someone already did this awhile ago), and a mechanism for switching focus between panes within a window (including buttons, I guess), and then a key-command for popping up menus in a pane, and arrow keys to go through the menu items.  I think that would pretty much cover it. 
Actually, that doesn't sound too bad, anyone up for it? :)  (I'm perfectly happy to use a mouse, myself.)

- Doug Way
  dway at riskmetrics.com


> I guess I need to play around w/ squeak and see if I like it enough to want
> to hack the emacs stuff...
> 
> Thanks again.
> 
> Yoshiki Ohshima wrote:
> 
> >   Hello,
> >
> > > I have noticed several threads in the archives where people ask about
> > > integrating emacs into Squeak. The standard answer seems to be: why
> > > would you want to do that when the built-in editor is so nice?
> >
> >   Is it really seems the standard answer? :-) I actually
> > think the integration has a good point.  I
> > imagine that it would be nice if I don't have to move my
> > hands from the home position of keyboard, yet I still have
> > the full control of all Browsers, Inspectors, Workspaces,
> > etc.  (mouse-less Squeak?)
> >
> > #   When Nemacs 3.3.2 (based on GNU Emacs 18.55) was the
> > # latest, I read all of the 'info' and tried to do the
> > # examples in it.  It was real "wower" for me.
> >
> > > As a pre-newbie thinking about starting up in squeak, here's one reason:
> > > I'm looking for a platform where I can develop generic info management
> > > tools. The ability to plug in an editor with the power of emacs and the
> > > extensive package library of emacs is almost a sine qua non... So I'm
> > > wondering... how possible would this be to do? Does it even make sense
> > > to think about doing it?
> >
> >   I'm sorry but I don't understand what you want to do
> > well...  If I understand correctly, you could implement it
> > in Emacs-lisp:-)
> >
> >   Anyway, I think there are several possibilities to
> > integrate Squeak and Emacs.
> >
> >   0.  Implement some basic key combination in
> >       ParagraphEditor.   ...
> >
> >   1.  Inferior-Squeak mode.  (This doesn't mean that Squeak
> >       is inferior:-)  By Using OSProcess, use stdin/stdout
> >       as a log of a Workspace.  This one itself doesn't
> >       make much sense.
> >
> >   2.  text fragment by text fragment editing in Emacs.  Run
> >       gnuserv in Emacs and Squeak "asks" the Emacs to edit a
> >       certain fragment of text.  If the method is lengthy,
> >       or you want to perform some decent operation such as
> >       query-replace-regexp or dabbrev-expand, having this
> >       *option* is a plus.  One downside is you cannot
> >       evaluate code fragment while you're writing the code,
> >       but 1. would help it.
> >
> > The above three should be not so difficult to do.
> >
> >   3.  Write a Lisp interpreter in Squeak.  This would be a
> >       smooth approach, although there would be lots of labor
> >       if you want to run pretty large part of emacs-lisp
> >       libraries.
> >
> >   4.  Reimplement everything in Squeak.  more labor will be
> >       needed than 3. but more cleaner implementation.  (I
> >       wish someone would do this:-)
> >
> >   -- Yoshiki