[Jemacs-info] Is JEmacs still alive?

[Steinar Bang]

There doesn't seem to have been any activity on this mailing list,
since October 2005. Is JEmacs still alive?

The reason I'm asking is that I wonder how much work it would be to
use it to create an emacs'ish editor plugin, ref.
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=32589

Another thing I wonder about is how GNU Emacs compatible it is?
Ie. how much of the emacs lisp code created for GNU Emacs would it be
able to run?

I've been programming Java in Eclipse for the better part of a year
now, and I prefer to stick in the eclipse Java editor when writing
initial code, because it creates most of the boring code for me, and
it is very good at pointing out errors and in helping correcting them.

Eclipse also excels over emacs, is the way it presents the deeply
nested directory structures of Java packages.

However when I'm doing large scale editing I'm going back to emacs,
since it has much better search and replace, much better cut and paste
facilities and commands like `M-x occur RET' and `M-x grep RET' for
finding occurences of code snippets.

At least on linux, I'm (since yesterday) able to run emacsclient as
the system editor, which means that I can use the navigation
facilities of eclipse to find Java source files, and open them in
emacs.

But it would be nice to have something close to GNU Emacs integrated
as an eclipse editor...

[Per Bothner]

[Because JEmacs-info is so quiet and become what traffic that
shows up there is almost all spam, it is easy for me to miss
a non-spam posting from an non-subscriber. So either subscribe,
or at least cc me so I know I need to approve your message.]

Post by Steinar Bang
There doesn't seem to have been any activity on this mailing list,
since October 2005. Is JEmacs still alive?

I'd say it's dormant. I do very little work on JEmacs these days,
though I try to fix it when I notice something is broken.

Unfortunately, I can't afford to spend much time on JEmacs these
days, since I have to concentrate on things that are either more
popular or more likely to bring me income. That is primarily
the Scheme support in Kawa, though I'm also investing a lot of
time in implementing XQuery well.

This might change with community support for JEmacs: if somebody
else made a serious effort to improve JEmacs. But only rarely
has anyone else contributed patches, and that quite a while ago.
That lack of contribution I have to read as lack of serious interest.

Once I've gotten the next Kawa release out, my plan is to work
in web server tool. This ties into JEmacs in an interesting way:
I'd like to write an AJAX editing widget in a browser backed by
buffer on the server. I.e. a new display front end. That also
ties in with merging more code. One goal is to make an Emacs
buffer toolkit-independent, so you could have an SWT window,
a Swing Window, and a remote browser window all editing the
same buffer. Much of the code to do that exists already.

Post by Steinar Bang
Another thing I wonder about is how GNU Emacs compatible it is?
Ie. how much of the emacs lisp code created for GNU Emacs would it be
able to run?

The goal is to run most of it. But that all depends on how much effort
someone puts into it.

I will of course be happy to answer questions, critique patches, and
suggest things to do.

[Per Bothner]

Post by Steinar Bang
The reason I'm asking is that I wonder how much work it would be to
use it to create an emacs'ish editor plugin, ref.
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=32589

There are at least two philosophies:
* The current implementation is optimized for a stand-alone Emacs
editor, and uses SWT as a display toolkit the same way standard
Emacs may use gtk. In that case JEmacs would like to manage
the buffer directly, for best compatibility and code sharing
between different toolkits. And ideally (as I mentioned in
my previous reply) being able to display the same buffer using
multiple toolkits at the same time (such as needed for a true
emacsclient).

* However, for best Eclipse plugin integration you'd want to
be able to write customizations and extensions for existing
Eclipse plugins. That requires a more hands-off approach
from JEmacs - for example switching buffers and windows is
something JEmacs wouldn't control.

I see no reason why you couldn't support both models, but I don't
really know enough about Eclipse plugins to say how best to do it.