[racket-dev] Racket and Text Editors

30 minutes ago, Vincent St-Amour wrote:
> 
> As I mentioned at RacketCon, I've been working (with help from Asumu
> Takikawa and Jon Rafkind) on a document that provides pointers to
> tools for using Racket with popular text editors.
> 
> I now have a draft of it on my webpage:
> http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/stamourv/using-racket-with-your-editor-of-choice.html
> 
> I think this would be a nice resource to have somewhere in the
> Racket documentation. Does anyone have an idea where it should go?

In the guide, IMO.


> I'd also like feedback on the document itself. It's not especially
> detailed, and I'm sure I forgot a lot of useful things.

* xrepl should be mentioned at the top, since its main goal is to make
  it easy to live with *any* random editor, even notepad.  The
  specific highlights to mention is that it gives you an ,enter
  command to go into a module and an ,edit command that can be used to
  invoke your $EDITOR on a file (and it defaults to the file you
  entered into).  Also, there's a ,drracket command that can start
  drracket, which makes it easy to use <random editor> to write code,
  and drracket to test things.

* Maybe even move all of §3 to the top for a similar reason.  (But
  within that, xrepl should be first since its explicit purpose is to
  make it convenient to work with any editor)

* For Emacs, it should mention that `scheme-mode' is *still* good
  enough for most Racket code, although Racket obviously has many more
  forms.  Probably good to mention it last, since it's intended for
  some people who really don't want to try a new package.

* If "Quack and Geiser can be used together" and the reference is in
  the Geiser manual, then it makes more sense for Geiser to be
  mentioned second, and say it there.

* Also might good to mention that Neil is in the process of writing
  something new?

* For the Scribble mode entry, it should advise people that don't want
  to use Neil's thing to either try `texinfo-mode' or just a plain
  text mode.  The thing here is to prevent people from trying some
  random Scheme mode which can look @emph{pretty
                                          bad}.

* Did you verify that paredit treats []s properly?  (At least at some
  point in the past I think that it didn't.)

* You should use @exec{...} for all of the executable names (like some
  uses of "vi").

* Not to be outdone by vi(m), emacs has everything you want with paren
  highlighting, and more...  http://lemonodor.com/archives/001207.html
  Also, enter "emacs rainbow" and see what google suggest to end it
  with...

* I'm not sure that there's any point in mentioning `raco' -- it's as
  useful with drracket too.

* `check-requires' is even less important than that...  Including it
  means including a whole bunch of other things (for example, the
  macro stepper's textual interface).  If anything, add it as an xrepl
  command.

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!