[plt-scheme] handling user-breaks in MrEd app...

At Wed, 30 Oct 2002 23:54:21 -0600, Jefferson Provost wrote:
> Sorry guys, I rarely run drscheme, except for very small programs, or to 
> use the help desk.   I much prefer emacs with an inferior scheme buffer. 
>   You know how idiosynchratic people can be about their work 
> environments.   This mostly goes to how I like to work, but if I had to 
> pick my top pet peeves about developing in DrScheme they'd be:
> 
> - I don't want to have to press "check syntax" to get syntax coloring. 
> I want it "always on".

and "mostly" right isn't a problem, I guess? Yeah, for this one we just
don't have the energy to do something half-assed (albeit useful) like
emacs does.

> - I don't want to lose my interaction history when I press "execute". 
> In fact, I want to be able to interactively edit evaluate single 
> definitions, without always clearing the entire program state and 
> starting from scratch.

Once you get used to the so-called "transparent" repl, it can be quite
handy. As you develop, you are manually deciding which parts of your
program need to be re-loaded each time you make a change and this is
surprisingly tricky in Scheme. Instead, DrScheme makes sure that you
never have these "ghosts of programs past" lying around to confuse your
debugging.

Also, the meta-p history of expressions submitted to the REPL is still
there, even tho it isn't visible.

> - The editor can't keep up with my key-repeat when I hold down the 
> backspace key, and I end up over-deleting all the time (1.2GHz Athlon 
> running Debian linux).

We'll look into this. I've improved this once in recent memory, but I
should probably try to find more opportunities.

Robby