From: Friedrich Dominicus frido@q-software-solutions.de
I don't want to change your way of doing things. But I'm not willing
to just adopt to this way. I conceil I'm corrupted by (X)Emacs (it's among other a decent editor) Smalltalks Editors could gain much by just beeing a bit more Emacsish ....
I, too, have no desire to change anybody else's successful solution. But I dearly miss Emacs when working inside Squeak. (Not so much Dired, or Gnus, or any of the other Emacs-as-OS applications. Just Emacs, the excellent text editor.) I miss consistent keymappings (SVI/Emin held promise until it started spewing DNUs one evening... not sure what I did there), I really miss keyboard-only navigation; however, most of all I miss "dead" code: plain, flat, abstract text that only denotes code through some abstract evaluation.
For interacting with a live environment, the Browser is great. Squeak is full of wicked livecoding tools. But there's a mode when I don't want to livecode, when I do want to work against a flat, dead, textual representation of some subset of the program. Text is a marvelously malleable medium that I can feed to a host of other programs for pre- and post-processing. I can impose on plain text as much or as little structure as /I/ want, and change that structure at /my/ whim. Text is cheap to push around the screen, even on the slow devices that I favor, since its content has been computed statically. And a block of text doesn't need to be coherent again at all - neither syntactically nor semantically - until I return it to the livecode Squeak world with a fileIn.
As long as I have fileIn and fileOut, I have recourse to a familiar text editor. Now if only those methods were invokable from outside of the Squeak image ....