Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang

[Nathan Dehnel]

Which packages are those? I' ve only seen scheme-lsp-server, which
isn't merged yet


On Wed, Sep 27, 2023 at 1:44 PM Christine Lemmer-Webber
<cwebber@dustycloud.org> wrote:
>
> Nathan Dehnel <ncdehnel@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > ________________________________
> >
> >> Hi, for some reason emacs has become the elephant in the room of the
> >> discussion on contributing to guix.
> >>
> >> Regardless of one's opinion of emacs, I just want to add that this is
> >> itself strange.  I have contributed some (package definition) patches
> >> to guix, all without using emacs.
> >>
> >> I am not an emacs user, so emacs is not necessary for contributing to guix.
> >> For what it's worth, the emacs-motif package in Guix was my addition.
> >> I don't use it myself.
> >
> > I don't use emacs either (because it's so impenetrable), so I just use
> > kate instead, which isn't a great environment for me either. It has
> > rainbow parens, but it doesn't balance them, which is a hassle. I keep
> > using it though due to lack of time to browse through alternatives. I
> > heard about guile-studio, but it doesn't appear to have a dark mode,
> > and I imagine trying to add one would require a bunch of emacs-style
> > screwing around with it.
> >
> > https://archive.fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/lispforeveryone/
> > This is the only setup for coding in lisp that has actually looked
> > attractive to me. (Coding in wisp with colored blocks that transpiles
> > to s-expressions) Though I haven't had the time (and probably
> > expertise) to set it up for myself.
>
> Happy to see this talk get some attention.  It does advocate a variety
> of possible approaches, one of them Wisp (and the wisp-mode colored
> block stuff is pretty awesome).
>
> If you like that approach and want to not have to do the
> parenthesis-balancing as much yourself, there's an interesting overlap
> between Wisp and parinfer, which automatically infers the parentheses
> from whitespace but keeps them in the actual source.  I have personally
> never tried using parinfer for serious tasks though.  It still requires
> an editor set up for those features.
>
> Since Spritely is also using Guile heavily, we have also spent a lot of
> time talking about possible directions for helping non-emacs-users get
> going with our tooling.  Personally I think the biggest path to success
> is likely to be seeing Guile support (starting with parenthetical Guile)
> also be very strong in mainstream editors.  A lot has changed in the
> programming editor world recently: LSP looks like a very promising
> direction for this.  (Anyway, there's no decisionmaking yet in terms of
> what we're doing, it just has come up quite a bit.)
>
> Has anyone tried using an LSP-like environment and seeing if they can
> get something approximating the comfort that Guile and Geiser users in
> emacs have, I wonder?  I have seen there are a couple of guile LSP
> packages but I have not personally tried them.
>
>  - Christine