On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 07:54:10PM -0800, Derek Peschel wrote:
More importantly to me, the prompt tells me "this is what *PACKAGE* was when I ran this command n {minutes,hours,days} ago." I'd be very unhappy for that information to go away.
I wodnered if that issue would come up. If the information was stored as a property of the text region that contains the command, and displayed on the mode line or something, would that work for you?
My gut feeling is that putting more distance between the expression and the package it was run in is not a win for me. Plus you'd have to put point on it to determine it that way which is quite inconvenient.
Do you want to see that kind of prompt in an editor buffer or let the editor take care of it?
In a normal Lisp buffer I agree - its primary purpose is editing the file, and interaction with the Lisp is secondary. Having a buffer-package shown on the mode-line works well in that case. However, I think the REPL buffer is a different story - interaction is primary there, so I think the prompt works well (for me).
I'm going a step further and changing the way the package and evaluation state are shown. It's purely for appearance. Would a REPL buffer be nicer if the left margins of all lines of input and output were aligned?
IMHO, no. I like having the input indented by the prompt because it helps delimit what exactly is input without relying on font faces.
Please experiment, though. Just make the end product be a customize option and everyone will be happy. :-)
-bcd