Awesome
Femto-Emacs
Tiny emacs clone that can be configured with femtolisp
ncurses femtoemacs requires the ncurses
library. This library
allows one to treat a text terminal as an editor window. You must download, build and install ncurses. You can obtain it here.
In English, some people add marks or glyphs to certain letters. For instance, instead of writing "facade", they write "façade". On the same token, they write "café" in lieu de "cafe". If you need or like diacritics, you must compile the libncurses library thus:
% cd ncurses-6.0/
% ./configure --enable-widec
% make
% sudo make install
MAC OS-X
The developers of femtoemacs assume that you have placed
libncursesw.a
here:
/usr/local/lib/libncursesw.a
Therefore, enter the folder where you unpacked the ncursesw-6.0
distribution archive, and copy the libncursesw.a
file to
/usr/local/lib/
as shown below.
% cd ncurses-6.0
% cd lib
% sudo cp libncursesw.a /usr/local/lib/
After installing libncursesw
, enter the folder Femto-Emacs/femto/
and build the editor for Macistosh:
% cd ~/Femto-Emacs/
% make -f Makefile.macosx
% sudo make -f Makefile.macosx install
You can test the editor in loco:
% femto test.scm
You can remove Femto-Emacs from your system with the following command:
% sudo sh uninstall.sh
Linux
Do not use apt-get
to install ncurses, because the repositories are
old. Instead, download a recent source distribution and build it thus:
% cd ncurses-6.0
% ./configure --enable-widec
% make
% sudo make install
After installing ncursesw
, you can make the editor:
% cd ~/Femto-Emacs/
% make
% sudo make install
Test the editor in loco:
% femto test.scm
You can remove Femto-Emacs from your system with the following command:
% sudo sh uninstall.sh
Hopefully, you will be able to use femto anywhere in your computer. You will notice that it will pop up much faster than emacs.
Short term goals
Binaries for Windows. Since most Windows users don't know how to compile applications from source, we need to provide binaries. If you want to contribute with mingw binaries, please let us know.
Documentation. We intend to provide good documentation for people who want to extend the editor or adapt femtolisp for this new role of scripting language.
Lisp Interaction Mode
There are two way to interact with Femto Lisp from inside FemtoEmacs.
At a command prompt: Enter <kbd>C-o</kbd> and type a lisp command followed by <kbd>return</kbd>. The result is inserted into the current buffer at the cursor location
Inside the actual buffer: Place the cursor on the openning or closing
bracket (
or )
. This will define a block. Now enter
<kbd>ESC-]</kbd>. The code will be copied to the FemtoLisp
interpreter and the result inserted into the buffer. This is very
useful for trying out bits of lisp code when developing Emacs
extensions.
Integration of Femto with Femtolisp to be become FemtoEmacs
Femtolisp required three modifications, in order to work as a
script language for femto
. In the file flcall.c
you will be find
the functions callLisp
and initLisp
, that are used for calling a
Lisp function from C and initializing Lisp, respectively. In
file interface2editor.c
you will find all functions directly related
to the editor.
It is also necessary to generate a boot and a compiler without a
Read Eval Print Loop. This is done in file mkeditorboot.lsp
, that
has three lines:
(load "femtosystem.lsp") ;; system without Read Eval Print Loop
(load "compiler.lsp") ;; compiler exactly like femtolisp compiler
(make-system-image "femto.boot") ;; generate femto.boot
The only difference between femto.boot
and flisp.boot
is in
function __start
, that does nothing in the editor, besides
initializing the global environment.
(define (__start argv)
(__init_globals))
In femtolisp, this funcion is defined in system.lsp
, and
implements the Read Eval Print Loop:
(define (__start argv)
(__init_globals)
(if (pair? (cdr argv))
(begin
(set! *argv* (cdr argv))
(set! *interactive* #f)
(__script (cadr argv)))
(begin
(set! *argv* argv)
(set! *interactive* #t)
(princ *banner*)
(repl)))
(exit 0))
The __start
function is called in flcall.c
:
(void)fl_applyn(1, symbol_value(symbol("__start")),
argv_list(argc, argv));