Editing class method sources in single place

Ben Goetter goetter at mazama.net
Fri Feb 1 08:33:29 UTC 2008


From: Friedrich Dominicus <frido at 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 ....





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