That’s very nit-y. I’ve used several different emacs-like editors, including Hemlock, Edwin, Alpha, and Epsilon, and while I’m happy that they exist, the current state of the world is pretty much divided between GNU Emacs plus close variants, and editors that copy parts of the emacs UI but not its core extensibility.
In most cases, the key (I claim) isn’t “is it GNU or not?” but rather “can it run a large fraction of the Hugh mass of elisp?” - and unfortunately the answer is either “no” or “hopefully in the future”.
If that’s changed, please do let me know. Is there a better Common Lisp emacs these days than Hemlock? Is anyone making progress on a cl-capable guile emacs anymore? Thanks in advance.
I use Clozure CL and LispWorks, which have CL based Hemlock variants.
> “can it run a large fraction of the Hugh mass of elisp?”
Most of that runs only in GNU Emacs and less so in forks (Xemacs) of it.
Remember, Mezzano's goal is not to be a GNU or Linux compatible thing. There are already lots of that.
When one writes a Lisp system like Mezzano, it's probably better not to use GNU Emacs anyway, since the compatibility to GNU Emacs isn't important and the Emacs UI isn't that great anyway, and there is no GNU system underneath.
If it runs McCLIM, one could also port an McCLIM-based editor (also a variant of Emacs) to it and use that.
Sure it will not run the zillion lines of Emacs Lisp, but I guess that was not the main interest for this 'exotic' Lisp OS project.
Honestly, based on my minimal experience fooling with Zmacs on my Lisp Machines, a non-GNU emacs with Common Lisp underneath is likely to be much better, especially if it can use a general purpose command system like CLIM’s.
Also if one looks at MCL's Fred (-> Fred resembles Emacs deliberately), that was nicely programmable and also possible to use as dialog items in GUIs. For CL applications I vastly prefer such a flexible model (object-oriented architecture, editor windows with an optimized Emacs-like command set, reuse as components in GUIs, ...), instead of a large monolithic editor, which then needs to be used as an external program...
In most cases, the key (I claim) isn’t “is it GNU or not?” but rather “can it run a large fraction of the Hugh mass of elisp?” - and unfortunately the answer is either “no” or “hopefully in the future”.
If that’s changed, please do let me know. Is there a better Common Lisp emacs these days than Hemlock? Is anyone making progress on a cl-capable guile emacs anymore? Thanks in advance.