What is exactly the target group of DrRacket? If it's meant to be an easy to use basic IDE for learning the language(s) I think it does a fairly good job and from what I have seen in various internet forums it's usually highly recommended as such when the topic of learning Scheme comes up. But as a serious alternative to IDEs like Eclipse or Emacs it lacks a lot of features. Now, there is no point in trying to compete with Emacs (if you go that route people are not going to be satisfied unless it can read their ~/.emacs ;) ) and as far as I know that was never even the intention, but I'd like to have some of the easy of customization Emacs offers in DrRacket. Partly it's probably just a matter of documentation and examples but since I'm having problems with even the basic thing like adding/changing the keybindings it seems that there could be some work done in that department.
Some other basic things I'd really like to have: - Paredit like editing functions, I can't personally use an editor without these anymore. Again, this is something that could be hacked up easily in Emacs but with DrRacket I have no idea where to start. - Context aware autocompletion. Geiser and Slime provide this by querying the runtime and I suppose Dr could use the static analysis tools for the same effect. - Show arglist/documentation, goto definition, cross referencing. - Refactoring. I'm not sure how well the tools currently in Dr work for this? Does it work across module boundaries? - Maybe a class browser? The OO parts of Racket aren't probably used that much in general, but when working with GUI code having something like this would be nice. And something similar for modules, the current module browser is a good start but it would be nice to have more functionality. A general browser toolkit for building this kind of tools? - Send expression to the REPL functionality. I know that this kind of functionality is limited for a reason but since the REPL is still there it would be nice if it could be interacted with more comfortably. - In general the UI requires too much mousing around for my taste. For example, the incremental search is very clumsy compared to Emacs. - A wholly separate issue but DrRacket is still very sluggish for me, especially with scrolling. -- tomppa _________________________________________________ For list-related administrative tasks: http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/users
