Dear list-members,

This is the semi-annual [ahem - must do better...] update on progress for those who don't follow climacs-cvs closely.

Since the last report there have been a number of developments, not the least of which are reports of actual users who are not also climacs developers. This has come about partly as a result of Dwight Holman's clim-desktop project, which enables users to build an image containing an integrated set of clim-based applications, including, of course, climacs. The other parts of clim-desktop are Clouseau (an inspector), the Listener, a debugger, Closure (a web browser), Beirc (an IRC client) and Swine, which extends climacs to use swank (the Slime backend) to provide some slime-like functionality.

Clim-desktop adds the following commands and functionality:

Eval Last Expression C-c C-e Macroexpand 1 C-c C-m Macroexpand All C-c M-m Eval Region C-c C-r Compile Definition C-c C-c Compile And Load File C-c C-k Compile File C-c M-k Edit Definition M-. Return From Definition M-, (together with compiler note and cross reference display and navigation) Hyperspec Lookup C-c C-d h (using Closure) Arglist Lookup C-c C-d a Swine Completion M-Tab Swine Fuzzy Completion C-c M-i (arglists shown in minibuffer on #\Space) Inspect Buffer C-c C-d C-b Inspect Window C-c C-d C-w (using Clouseau)

And, of course, COMMON-LISP:ED will open climacs!

Other user-visible changes to climacs include:

* Mouse left-click positions the cursor, right-click copies, and middle-click pastes

* Describe Key Briefly C-h c, Where Is C-h w, Describe Bindings C-h b

* Splitting and resizing windows is prettier (Dwight Holman again)

* The package of a lisp file is detected and displayed in the info-pane

* The beginnings of a User Manual (Robert Strandh)

And Marcus Pearce has added significant functionality by tying together Christophe Rhodes' prolog-sytax to his (Christophe's) paiprolog, an expansion and ISOfication of the sexp-based Prolog from Norvig's 'Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming' (PAIP).

Behind the scenes there was a proliferation of command-tables and command-containing files, Christophe and David Lewis helped implement per-syntax commands, and Max-Gerd Retzlaff tidied up some pathname and pane-naming issues.

In terms of infrastructure, the refactoring of certain functionality into the ESA ('Emacs Style Application') system seems to have worked, with ESA now being used in Gsharp and newcomer Ftd; Aleksandar Bakic (with the assistance of Derek Peschel) continued his work on cl-automaton.

As to future directions Creighton Hogg will be progressively adding documentation to the commands in-program, and Nicholas Sceaux is working on the abstraction of the LR-parser functionality used in lisp-syntax.

So this announcement marks the point at which climacs became genuinely useful to lisp developers: Robert reports that developing Gsharp in climacs (using clim-desktop) is a real pleasure, not least because, being lisp all the way down, nits in the development environment are only a M-., edit and C-c C-c away from being fixed. There is still a long way to go (and it is the essence of a programmable development environment that it is never finished), but future is looking good.

Best regards, JQS

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