I started writing another text editor. Not exactly original, but at this point I don’t really have any original ideas anymore. I want to write some code on the side for fun, but I don’t have as much time or motivation as I used to. I have been looking for a lisp environment that’s free software, but there isn’t much out there. The two implementations that I’m aware of are lem and Second Climacs.
Lem is probably the most mature implementation, but I wasn’t able to get the SDL2-backend working on my machine. There was some exception early on at startup. Poking around with the code, I was able to get it to display the initial screen if I messed around with the threading so that it wasn’t using locks and multiple threads. I was able to get the terminal ncurses backend working, but I didn’t really feel like I would be missing something big by not using it. The undo implementation seemed lacking but I didn’t really write things down for a review.
Second Climacs runs on McCLIM, which currently only supports running under X. I’m running sway without xwayland, so I don’t have a way to run that currently unless I install xwayland, which I’m not particularly motivated to do. If it was further along I might have done it, but from what I’ve seen, it’s still in its infancy. I have wanted to try McCLIM for a while now, but all the concepts (“ports, grafts, and mirrored sheets”) come across as so foreign and abstract. I just want something simple like SDL.
That leaves Emacs as the only modern lisp environment, and while it’s pretty much “good enough” for everyone, people are also always asking the question, “What if it was in a modern lisp?”
Anyways, after lem being so close to usable, I decided to start writing another text editor using common lisp and cl-sdl2. Perhaps one of the things Common Lisp got wrong was not having a formal threading specification, but on the other hand, C was successful without one. A lot of people say that the “single threadedness” of Emacs is one of its biggest weaknesses, but I think the simplicity of the programming model is why so many people were able to build so much on top of it. Using that as inspiration, I’ve decided to make the lisp environment I’m working on single threaded as well.
There are probably a lot of questions I’ll need to answer, like, “If an inferior lisp model is the best way to work, then why does it matter what language the editor is written in?” I think I’d agree with that, the editor’s language doesn’t matter. At the same time, I don’t really want to make a programmer’s IDE. My main uses of emacs are for reading news and email, so that’s my goal. So if I can replace notmuch-emacs, dired, and eww, then I’ll be all set. For news, I have a custom rss to maildir program, so I’d probably add that in somewhere.