Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang

[Christine Lemmer-Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org>]

Nathan Dehnel <ncdehnel@gmail.com> writes:

> ________________________________
>
>> Hi, for some reason emacs has become the elephant in the room of the
>> discussion on contributing to guix.
>>
>> Regardless of one's opinion of emacs, I just want to add that this is
>> itself strange.  I have contributed some (package definition) patches
>> to guix, all without using emacs.
>>
>> I am not an emacs user, so emacs is not necessary for contributing to guix.
>> For what it's worth, the emacs-motif package in Guix was my addition.
>> I don't use it myself.
>
> I don't use emacs either (because it's so impenetrable), so I just use
> kate instead, which isn't a great environment for me either. It has
> rainbow parens, but it doesn't balance them, which is a hassle. I keep
> using it though due to lack of time to browse through alternatives. I
> heard about guile-studio, but it doesn't appear to have a dark mode,
> and I imagine trying to add one would require a bunch of emacs-style
> screwing around with it.
>
> https://archive.fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/lispforeveryone/
> This is the only setup for coding in lisp that has actually looked
> attractive to me. (Coding in wisp with colored blocks that transpiles
> to s-expressions) Though I haven't had the time (and probably
> expertise) to set it up for myself.

Happy to see this talk get some attention.  It does advocate a variety
of possible approaches, one of them Wisp (and the wisp-mode colored
block stuff is pretty awesome).

If you like that approach and want to not have to do the
parenthesis-balancing as much yourself, there's an interesting overlap
between Wisp and parinfer, which automatically infers the parentheses
from whitespace but keeps them in the actual source.  I have personally
never tried using parinfer for serious tasks though.  It still requires
an editor set up for those features.

Since Spritely is also using Guile heavily, we have also spent a lot of
time talking about possible directions for helping non-emacs-users get
going with our tooling.  Personally I think the biggest path to success
is likely to be seeing Guile support (starting with parenthetical Guile)
also be very strong in mainstream editors.  A lot has changed in the
programming editor world recently: LSP looks like a very promising
direction for this.  (Anyway, there's no decisionmaking yet in terms of
what we're doing, it just has come up quite a bit.)

Has anyone tried using an LSP-like environment and seeing if they can
get something approximating the comfort that Guile and Geiser users in
emacs have, I wonder?  I have seen there are a couple of guile LSP
packages but I have not personally tried them.

 - Christine