Second Climacs: An Emacs-like editor

Second Climacs is an Emacs-like editor written entirely in Common Lisp. It is called Second Climacs because it is a complete rewrite of the Climacs text editor.

Improvements

Climacs gave us some significant experenice 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 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 Climacs is very hard to maintain, and while it is better than that of Emacs, it is still not good enough. Second Climacs uses a modified version of the Common Lisp reader in order to parse buffer contents, making it much closer to the way the contents is read by the Common Lisp compiler.

• Climacs depends on McCLIM for its graphic user interface. Second Climacs is independent of any particular library for making graphic user interfaces, allowing it to be configured with different such libraries. Though, at the moment, the only graphic user interface that exists uses McCLIM.

Quick Start

1. Make sure you have installed the dependencies:

• A recent 64-bit version of SBCL
• The system "cluffer" from the Cluffer repository
• The system "cluffer-emacs-compatibility" from the Cluffer Emacs Compatiblity
• The system "stealth-mixin", from the Stealth mixin repository
• The system "eclector", from [the Eclector3 repository]

The bash script get-dependencies.sh will do this work for you.

2. Clone the source with git:

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

3. Make sure the top-level directory can be found by ASDF.

4. Compile the editor system as follows:

   (asdf:load-system :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

I am not accepting contributions at this time. I will make an exception for someone who is highly motivated and willing to spend time understanding the goals of the project, and then only after discussing the ideas with me.