alt Hacker NewsA small but illustrative example: given a live running clisp program, I can click on a UI element to inspect both the live object and the underlying code in the IDE. I can even copy and paste UI elements!
Emacs is text-centric, LispWorks is clisp-centric with a real GUI designed for computers with a keyboard and mouse. There's a whole MVC system! Wow!
GNU Emacs, Lem, etc. are all very nice editors, but they're stuck in the 1970s and are entirely keyboard-centric with very primitive UI flows. You can get used to it, but never fix it. If I wanted to use slime-fancy to inspect a class, what I get is a dead list of raw text that I have to awkwardly interact with. When I inspect a class in LispWorks, I get truly interactive UI elements which themselves map to rich Lisp objects.
Even editors like Lem that fix Emacs' performance issues (another genuine problem), they all make the same mistake of being centered around text-buffers and under-engineered UI frameworks. You can extend them ad infinitum, but if the roots are rotten...
Second Climacs exists, but it's more of a curiosity and a research project than a usable text editor IME (and is also currently tied to X, though that doesn't affect me personally). I hope that changes some day.
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> A small but illustrative example: given a live running clisp program, I can click on a UI element to inspect both the live object and the underlying code in the IDE. I can even copy and paste UI elements!
I agree GUI is awkward in Emacs/SLIME. I think the reason is there isn't a standardized GUI framework across the Lisp world. Otherwise people can make SLIME support it.
> If I wanted to use slime-fancy to inspect a class, what I get is a dead list of raw text that I have to awkwardly interact with.
This part I do not agree. Nowadays "text" in Emacs/SLIME is far from "raw text", there's button that respond to hover, with right click context menu, and can be copy and pasted. I recall some small quirks (like objects in inspector are not presentations) but the only reason they aren't fixed (yet) is nobody get bothered enough. There's rarely any fundamental limitation. After all, it wouldn't be fare to call LispWorks UI "dead pixels".
BTW I once wrote yet another over ambitious project < https://github.com/neomacs-project/neomacs > but it doesn't go anywhere either. People do not care enough, Emacs is good enough.
I wish an ambitious approach such as Project Mage had taken off - https://project-mage.org/
It makes me sad that some-mthfka got some but perhaps not enough support and the effort stalled after a few months.