[plt-scheme] Interacting w/ MzScheme

From: Guillaume Marceau (gmarceau at cs.brown.edu)
Date: Thu Dec 9 23:54:40 EST 2004

On Thu, 2004-12-09 at 22:03, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
>   For list-related administrative tasks:
>   http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-scheme
> 
> Okay, I am not interested in random statements like "I like my Emacs 
> better." So do I. I know that DrScheme isn't Emacs. Something like "I 
> miss tagging" or "I miss a cvs mode" or "I miss a spell checker" is 
> useful.

I've been remarkably resilient to switch away from Emacs. I will use
DrScheme for running files written inside DrScheme, for DrScheme. Like
Pinku, sometime I cannot be bothered to look up all the command lines
switches necessary to make mred simulate DrScheme's language levels:

 ~/bin/PLT/bin/mred -M errortrace \
                    -L plai-advanced.ss plai \
                    -e "(current-eventspace (make-eventspace))" \
                    -e "(print-structs true)" \
                    -r $1

But soon enough, I revert to Emacs. I miss the following Emacs features,
when I code in DrScheme:

   incremental search without a mouse
   navigate down and up a stack trace without a mouse
   open files without a mouse
   switch between files by name
   dynamic expansions (M-/ or M-x dabbrev-expand)
   keyboard macros

These features are so deeply ingrained in my fingers, that their absence
is distracting. When I code in DrScheme, I become self-conscious of the
keys I type, and I quickly switch back to Emacs.

In contrast, although I use many other features from Emacs'
swiss-army-chainsaw collection, I could do without them. For instance, I
do spell check my variable names with M-$, and I do use ediff to revise
my changes, and I do use TAGS[*] to navigate code. These feature are
more peripheral to my coding.

[*] I use my own TAGS file generator for mzscheme:
    http://www.cs.brown.edu/~gmarceau/etags.ss



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