Re: A series of articles about text-editors for the MAPS

[Bill Meahan <wmeahan94@gmail.com>]

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On 08/08/2012 09:19 AM, Martin 'golodhrim' Scholz wrote:
> Hi Willi,
>
> I used vim/gvim in the past and switched to emacs. I write all my stuff
> with ConTeXt and with some tweaking of the commands you can also make
> mkiv run inside of emacs. also nice is to write your metapost and use
> the metapost mode for it that can generate a preview inside emacs for
> you. Together with auctex and reftex emacs is in my opinion the best
> tool for writing TeX/LaTeX/ConTeXt documents.
>

I USED to run emacs + auctex but the ConTeXt support in auctex is 
minimal so I asked on the auctex mailing list if there would be any 
expansion of the ConTeXt support. I got back a one-sentence reply:

"Code doesn't change itself."

That ticked me off as the FSF has done for 30+ years. Not everyone is a
developer and just having the source code doesn't mean you understand 
the language, the programming style, the particular programmer's choice 
of "tricks" or the way the software is broken up into functions, what 
functions are global and what functions are package-specific.

A polite, "No, there's nobody working on it right now." might not have 
gored my ox so badly.

Since I'm going to have to write the kind of ConTeXt support I want, I 
switched to Textadept. Textadept is conceptually similar to emacs but it 
has been designed from the ground up for modern systems (emacs dates 
back to the 1970's) and uses Lua for an extension language. Lua is 
sufficiently similar to languages I have worked with in the past so 
learning it is pretty easy compared to learning LISP (aka "Long 
Indecipherable Sets of Parentheses") which is unlike anything else, period.

Textadept is based on Scintilla rather than some home-grown display 
mechanism.

I'm working on a ConTeXt-specific extension mode for ConTeXt that will 
not only provide syntax highlighting and command completion, but will 
provide command-specific option and parameter pick-lists for each 
command. Unfortunately, it's in my queue behind a couple of other big 
writing/journalism projects and won't be done for a while.

I thought I was done coding after 45+ years of doing it but I guess I'm not.

Sorry for the rant.


-- 
Bill Meahan, Westland, Michigan USA

“Writing is a combination of intangible
   creative fantasy and appallingly
   hard work.”

           —Anthony Powell


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