State of the dto

Hello Planet Emacsen readers,

I thought I would post something because it's been a few weeks since my last message.

The Eon project is in alpha and progressing at a reasonable pace. As I may have mentioned before, I'm taking some deliberate steps to improve my programming skills and development practices; working on Eon has become a good way to learn.

There's a lot of manual-reading, which is always healthy. But the most effective thing for me has been learning directly from other developers—by reading their code, or through discussions on IRC. I've always been one of the "lone programmer" types, but now Eon has two new developers (welcome Tom and Andre!) and a public Subversion repository. With a few more decades of obsessive work and deep self-abnegation, I may yet become a "real programmer".

Here's what I've been working on this week:

• the eon object system: is being revised a bit to change the syntax of message sends and expand the notion of methods to include something like the Symbolics Genera "Presentation Type" system.
• vwindow — This is a virtual window library that can superimpose what appear to be free-floating or pop-up Emacs windows on top of a buffer without disturbing the text. It will also include a preliminary replacement for the aging widget.el that comes with Emacs, and an abstract spreadsheet editor derived from my old cell-mode stuff. My goal is much more than just to replace the X toolkit menus (which inexplicably block Emacs and its subprocesses while they are open) and the awful Customize interface with something much more powerful. I also want to make it easy for Emacs Lisp developers to separate their user interfaces from their application logic. Most Emacs packages build their user interfaces from scratch (possibly because the built-in widgets suck) which is why we have 3 different implementations of a spreadsheet UI widget (including mine) and God knows how many subtly different dired-like modes.
• ushell — A universal shell inspired by the Genera "Dynamic Lisp Listener". This is intended to be a replacement for eshell (and much else) with the ability to talk to multiple "backends" in the same session. The POSIX sh backend works by talking to bash over a pipe or socket, which probably works better in the long run than trying to do serious process control or input redirection from within native Emacs Lisp. But it can also talk to snd, or sbcl, or stumpish, or any combination of the above—at the same command line.

I'll keep you posted…