On Wed, 2008-01-02 at 06:25 -0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Happy New Year to all. Let's make it great one. > > This is intended as reply to Robin Dunn's excellent post: "Your > mission, should you choose to accept it. The essence of Robin's > 'mission impossible' is: > > "So here is your challenge and your mission impossible, should you > choose to accept it: Create a code editor that will pry emacs and its > 25-year-old nearly dead technology out from under my fingers." > > As a thought experiment, I would like to ask, suppose we waved a magic > wand and produced a complete (whatever that means) Python (swig?) > wrapper for Emacs: the *real* Emacs. Would that be what Robin wants? > If not, why not? > > In particular, what is the "25-year-old nearly dead technology" to > which Robin refers. Is it elisp? Is it the c implementation? > Something else? > > In other words, suppose we could access all of Emacs *itself* from > Python. Would that be sufficient? > > Here is where I am coming from. I spent over a year putting an emacs > minibuffer in Leo. This was time well spent, and not just because it > gave Leo new features. The biggest win was being able to think in > terms of Emacs-like commands. I have lost track of the times that > being able design at the level of do-this, do-that, do-another-thing > has clarified my thinking. > > So I am a huge fan of Emacs's design. Furthermore, Emacs is a > *platform*, similar to Java, wxWidgets, tkinter, etc. But this > platform is optimized for editing! It's hugely popular, it's very > fast, and just about everything that anyone has ever wanted exists as > an Emacs mode. > > So maybe the idea of giving Emacs a set of python wrappers is more > than just a thought experiment? It would be a new playground for me: > I could add Leo stuff to Emacs and stop trying to do what Emacs > already does so well. But don't these remarks apply more or less to > every developer on pyxides? > > What do you think, Amigos? > > Edward
Hi Edward, Well we have gone some of the way in wrapping real Emacs in a python wrapper in PIDA, http://pida.co.uk/ screenshot: http://pida.co.uk/files/screenshots/pida_0-5-1_16.png I am not sure this is exactly what you mean, but it is certainly a viable approach to achieving some of the things you are hinting about. Ali
