Hi all,

I'd like to welcome everyone to the ABLE project at cl.net.

Upon hearing that Phil could no longer maintain ABLE, I felt compelled to pick up the project. While I don't know anyone who uses ABLE as their primary editor, I join many others who want a graphical environment that Emacs/Slime will probably never offer. While today ABLE is far from the best editor, I believe it provides a useful skeleton for the future, powered by the cross-platform Ltk.

This email marks the end of my current round of development. - Master now contains menus! This was a FAQ that bugged me as well, and I made a stab at fixing it. Feel free to submit comments (better, patches) that improve the menu ordering, naming, etc. - The new pb branch contains the beginnings of a package browser/ graphical inspector. To try it, (require :able), (load "pb"), and finally run (package-browser).

Both master and pb were developed against http://ltk.rplay.net/svn/branches/ltk/repl revision 215

The pb branch also uses a patch sent to the ltk-user mailing list. http://common-lisp.net/pipermail/ltk-user/2010-January/000697.html

If you use ABLE, or would if ABLE just had feature X, please send a message to this list letting us know how to make a better toolset. Please resend requests that Phil may have been working on as well. I'm making no promises to actively maintain ABLE, but this mailing list should be seen as an open tool for the user community.

If you have changes to commit, please send diffs (preferably the output of git-format-patch) to this list, and start the subject line with "[patch]". I'll try to quickly vet and push such patches to the repository. If you become a frequent contributor, we can get you permissions on cl.net to push changes directly.

Later, Daniel