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.