Hi all,
I am a new gambit user. I am working through some scheme texts and
gambit fits the bill nicely. I am curious as to how most folks
develop in gambit. Do you use a terminal and text editor, emacs,
or what? So far, I have been using terminal and kate, but it would
be nice to have some integration. I was
thinking along the lines of what a primitive ide provides where
you edit your whatever.scm and then execute it or parts of it on
demand from the editor.
Most of us use Emacs, I'd wager -- I know I do -- but a terminal and text editor is a perfectly cromulent, if cumbersome, way to develop in Scheme. In general, I've come to believe that Emacs is now a liability for the Lisp community, rather than a strength. By giving the impression that Emacs is a requirement, or darn near a requirement, to develop in Lisp, we risk alienating a large chunk of the base of potential new developers. Therefore I would strongly urge anyone interested in developing in Lisp (whether CL, Scheme, or otherwise) to do so, irrespective of whether they intend to learn Emacs; and for hackers on other editors to build out better Lisp tooling -- in particular, most new programmers these days use Visual Studio Code; we've got to meet them where they are and have better Scheme integration for VSCode.
I'm a vi guy, so I don't know much about emacs, but folks
seem to like that environment, especially when it comes to lisp,
et. al. If you're using emacs, and think that's the way to go,
please give me a clue where to start. I can M-x run-scheme and it
pulls up gambit in a scheme inferior mode (whatever that is) and
it'll let me run gambit in the window, but that doesn't seem any
more useful than doing it in terminal.
"Inferior" means Emacs starts and controls the Scheme process. In particular, Emacs can send whatever it likes to the Scheme process to be evaluated by Scheme.
The upshot of this is, if you have a running inferior scheme, there are keybindings in every scheme-mode buffer that let you push a chunk of that buffer (region, last sexpr, etc.) to the running inferior scheme. This alone is worth its weight in gold, because it makes things much faster than pasting into a terminal repl. Geiser gives you even more convenience. Say C-h f inferior-scheme-mode for more information (or C-h f geiser-mode once you install Geiser).
Hope that gives you options to think about.
--Jeff