Re: [j-devel] Minibuffers in j?

[Dan M. <dn...@po...>]

Hi Peter!

Peter Graves wrote:

> On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 at 21:54:52 -0800, Dan Moniz wrote:

[snip]

> Sounds like what you want is a shell buffer.
> 
> Add this line to ~/.j/prefs (or C:\.j\prefs):
> 
>     enableExperimentalFeatures = true
> 
> Then do Alt X, "shell" (or Alt F9, which is its default mapping).
> 
> On Windows XP this should get you a somewhat functional shell buffer.
> (If you want a split window, F10 is your friend.)

This worked great. I *knew* it was in there somewhere. Thanks!

> On Unix platforms (inluding OS X), shell buffers require jpty, which
> you'll need to build from source (jpty.c in the src/jpty directory);
> you should put the jpty executable somewhere in your PATH.
> 
> I don't have an OS X machine, so I don't know whether the current
> version of jpty.c builds or works on OS X. Some years ago I spent a few
> hours on a borrowed Mac trying to get an earlier version of jpty to
> work on an earlier version of OS X, without success (but I don't think
> I had the right development tool setup on that machine).

I'll try this sometime this week and report back.

> On Windows, cmd.exe should work without jpty. At one point, you could
> even use bash under Cygwin if you built jpty with Cygwin gcc, but I
> haven't tried that in a long time.
> 
> Shell buffers work pretty well on Linux. I like shell buffers, and I
> use Linux myself, so that combination has had lots of exercise. On the
> other hand, I use Windows very rarely and OS X not at all, so shell
> buffer support on those platforms is not nearly as good (and in the
> case of OS X, possibly nonexistent). Tested patches are always welcome.
> 
> Theoretically, Tab in a shell buffer does shell-like completion, and
> Ctrl P and Ctrl N navigate through command history.

Tab, C-p, and C-n all work in the Windows (cmd.exe) shell. I notice when 
I run irb (as an example) with readline completion from a cmd.exe 
spawned inside a shell buffer, tab isn't recognized, so I think it's not 
being passed to irb for some reason. Where ought I look in the j code to 
see if I can diagnose this and hack up a patch?

[snip]

> Console Lisps are best run in Lisp shells: do Alt X, "lisp [path-to-
> lisp-executable]", e.g. Alt X, "lisp /usr/bin/lisp" to run cmucl on
> Linux. If you don't specify a Lisp executable, you'll get ABCL. Lisp
> shells for Lisps other than ABCL require jpty on Unix platforms.
> 
> There's also slime-for-j, which is supported for ABCL, SBCL, and
> Allegro: Alt X, "slime [path-to-lisp-executable]".

I notice the j website cautioned "SLIME for j" as being very alpha code; 
I assume it's further along now given the development on ABCL?

I'll try this with ACL and CLISP later today on my Windows machine.

[snip]

>>Bonus points if I can write a function in ABCL that will take the
>>contents of the current buffer and redirect it as stdin to the
>>minibuffer (I already have commands in j to spawn a cmd.exe outside
>>of j and eval either a saved file or selected code).
> 
> I don't think this exists per se, but it shouldn't be too hard to
> write such a thing. There might be something vaguely similar in
> slime.lisp (slime-eval-region, maybe).

I'll look into it. Sounds good!

Thanks for your informative reply, and for your work on j!


-- 
Dan Moniz <dn...@po...> [http://www.pobox.com/~dnm/]