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Introduction

Second Climacs is an Emacs-like editor that is focused on editing Common Lisp code and that is written entirely in Common Lisp. The project is called Second Climacs because it is a complete rewrite of the Climacs text editor.

The (First) Climacs editor gave us some significant experience with writing a text editor, and we think we can improve on a number of aspects of it. As a result, there are some major differences between (First) Climacs and Second Climacs:

• We implemented a better buffer representation, and extracted it from the editor code into a separate library named Cluffer. The new buffer representation will have better performance, especially on large buffers, and it will make it easier to write sophisticated parsers for buffer contents.

• The incremental parser for Common Lisp syntax of (First) Climacs is very hard to maintain, and while it is better than that of Emacs, it is still not good enough. Second Climacs uses an extensible implementation of the Common Lisp reader named Eclector together with an incremental parsing library named Incrementalist to parse buffer contents, making it extremely close to the way a Common Lisp compiler reads its input.

• (First) Climacs implements text editing commands as CLIM commands which assume a single current cursor. This design prevents reuse of text editing commands across different editors and makes it difficult to apply commands in other ways such as applying a given command for each of multiple cursors. Second Climacs uses the text.editing library to address both issues.

Quick Start

1. Clone the Second Climacs repository with git:

   $ git clone https://github.com/robert-strandh/Second-Climacs
   

2. Make sure the directories of the cloned repository can be found by ASDF.

3. Make sure you have installed the dependencies (dependencies that are readily available via Quicklisp are not listed):

   • A recent 64-bit version of SBCL
   • the Cluffer library
   • the text.editing library
   • the Eclector library
   • the Incrementalist library

   The bash script get-dependencies.sh from this repository can clone the above repositories into $HOME/quicklisp/local-projects/.

4. Compile the editor system as follows:

   (ql:quickload "second-climacs-clim")
   

5. To start Second Climacs, execute this form:

   (second-climacs-clim-base:climacs)
   

Documentation

Check the Documentation directory for more information.

Commands

At the moment, all you can do is type some text, and you can use C-x i to insert and existing file. Some basic Emacs commands also work, like C-f, C-b, C-p, C-n, M-<, M->, and C-x C-c. The visible window does not automatically follow the cursor yet.

Contributing

We are not accepting contributions at this time.