[Cuis-dev] Emacs & Smalltalk

[Nicola Mingotti]

Hi Hernan,

I have red your question, i will tell you my opinion without reading 
others answer not
be influenced ;)

Emacs is a great editor, but it has nothing to do with our wunderbar 
interactive environment.

Emacs is by nature textual, the Smalltalk (classic) GUI are by nature 
graphical.

Emacs is written in C & EmacsLisp. If you want to change it you need to 
use those languages.
So, You don't do it in CommonLisp, for example, nor in Python. In Pharo 
lingo, if i get it
correctly, CommonLisp + Emacs can't be considered a "moldable environment".

If i remember well a few weeks ago somebody posted in the Lisp subreddit 
an environment
inspired to Smalltalk for CommonLisp + Emacs. It may be one of our 
mailing list, i don't remember 100%.
It was cool. But still, a ghost of our tools.

If you want to try some Smalltalk in Emacs start with Gnu Smalltalk, i 
tried a tiny bit,
but i stopped because the Debian default package comes with an horrible 
bug: It can't parse
a trivial float like 12.34. So, I stopped my investigation, if there is 
such bug to me the message is "nobody
is using it".

I tried also LittleSmalltalk, for the text only approach, but 
unfortunately the current versions do not correspond anymore to what is 
written in the old (but very nice) book. So, dah, again, if you want do 
do some test
you need to start from C and debug stuff, this is not nice, requires a 
lot more time that i can.

So, in short, I have not still found a minimum-reliable-version of text 
only Smalltalk, therefore
trying Emacs + Smalltalk IMO it makes not sense, since Emacs is text only.

The GnuSmalltalk could be interesting, but unfortunately it seems it is 
a bit abandoned.

Bye
Nicola




On 12/31/21 00:44, Hernan Wilkinson via Cuis-dev wrote:
> Hi,
>  I've never used Emacs, I just run it some times and did not even have 
> time to read the manual, etc., but after seeing this video: "Emacs and 
> Montessori Philosophy" (https://emacsconf.org/2021/talks/montessori/) 
> and knowing that emacs runs on lisp and that you can modify emacs from 
> emacs using lisp, I could not avoid relating it with Smalltalk...
>  Does anybody have experience with Emacs? Is there something you can 
> say about Emacs & Smalltalk?
>
>  Thanks!
>  Hernan.
>