Re: [Chicken-users] Re: any Windows Emacs haters here?

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Reed Sheridan wrote:
> Modifying the internals of some other IDE to avoid configuring your
> .emacs isn't going to save you any grief.  Quite the opposite.  You
> could probably figure out how to get Emacs to indent your code the way
> you want in a day, at worst.

But that's what's ridiculous about XEmacs.  It should be doing that 
correctly out of the box.  I don't mean it doesn't indent the way I 
want.  I mean it doesn't indent at all.  Throwing "a day" at things is 
the whole mentality of Emacs that I think sucks.  It's forever broken, 
there's always some new bit of the docs you've gotta futz with.  It's 
just a big bloated ancient application with a lot of hair.

I've discovered Scintilla / SciTE.  http://www.scintilla.org  It's way 
smaller and claims to have some Scheme support already.  Reading what / 
how I could configure it is just 1 long webpage.  MinGW appears to be 
working out of the box.  Most importantly, it's a popular and mature 
open source project.  Plus it's MIT licensed.

I've gone through about a half dozen MinGW IDEs now, and I'm thinking 
that smaller is better.  The problem is, once the app starts seeing 
itself as an IDE rather than a text editor, it starts trying to control 
the build system.  It may invent its own build system, which makes CMake 
support politically difficult.  Or else it starts thinking it's supposed 
to provide a RAD environment, or huge class libraries, or whatever.  
Which leads to tons more documentation, it's harder to figure out, and 
harder to modify.  Core development effort goes towards more abstract 
high-level features, instead of the basics of working well out of the box.

So we'll see how far I get with SciTE.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every