On Oct 27, 10:35 pm, ArrantSquid <[email protected]> wrote: > Ha! I haven't heard that in a LONG time. Gonna tag our only emacs user > with that in the morning. :) I've not tried emacs, but I've heard that > it's fairly powerful. Vim does the job for me (almost literally > sometimes with all the plugins and custom stuff we have setup), but I > might give emacs a whirl just to see what the "other side" looks > like.
Well, Emacs is indeed pretty powerful, but to make full use of its power you kind of have to learn elisp. I'm definitely a Lisper, but I'll admit to not being nearly as good at elisp as I should be after all these years using Emacs. Elisp is a bit odd- dynamic scoping is a bit hard to wrap your head around. I'm a big fan of dynamic scoping in some places- Common Lisp gets this right, IMHO. But it's probably the wrong thing in general. I still use Emacs mainly because I am a Lisper, and no development environment I have used is as nice as Slime/Swank. If I ever have the time I would really like to build a set of bindings for the Maya API using ecls (a Common Lisp that compiles to C) that includes a Swank server. I think Python inside Maya is a great thing on the scripting side of things, but it's not so great for API stuff/plugins. One of the nice things about that is that it would allow you to change your plugin on the fly from within Emacs, without shutting Maya down- I really want to be able to highlight a bit of code in Emacs, hit some keys, and have the code change within a running Maya process. It would also be fairly performant- I like Python a lot, but it is just too slow for most of what I write, and the Python bindings to the API are pretty buggy. You could do this, in principle, with any editor that was fairly customizable, but all the machinery for it is already there in Emacs. Anyway, I am getting way off-topic for a Maya inside Python group, so I'll stop ;). -- view archives: http://groups.google.com/group/python_inside_maya change your subscription settings: http://groups.google.com/group/python_inside_maya/subscribe
