I know this will start some huge flame war &/or I should have read some
FAQ, sorry.
I find myself largely stranded on a Mac (OS X 10.current, PPC) - I
still have access to a Linux environment but it's a long way away - too
slow to run GUIs over for anything but hack value, and it's probably
going to get replaced by Solaris 10 x86 at some point anyway (by me).
I don't actually write very much Lisp any more (or anything really,
sigh) but I would like to revive my document preparation system, as
Word is unthinkable & trying to write anything non-trivial in
TiddlyWiki is not really much better. This system was written mostly
in portable CL, though all the build stuff for it & a client/server
interface which I used to drive it was LW based.
So I'd like to get all this working on my Mac.
*Ideally* I'd like something which doesn't require me to spend the rest
of my life configuring GNU Emacs, or in fact any of my life at all
configuring it - having weaned myself quite successfully off it after
20 years, I don't really want to go back there - and in any case there
doesn't seem to be any reasonable Mac OS X port (not something that
just uses X in other words). So something with a proper IDE would be
better.
It needs to be possible to talk to it (to a running image) from the
command line - my existing thing uses CORBA, but I'm fine using
whatever exists on the Mac.
I have no religious objections to commercial systems (in fact rather
the opposite) though the cheaper the better, obviously. In fact I'm
entirely uninterested in arguments on grounds of ideology, so if you
want to give these, don't.
The closer to the standard the better. Vendor stability also a mild
issue I guess.
I *think* that these constraints point me at one of MCL or LW, though I
think that LW enterprise is out of my price bracket for now, so I'd
need to work out how to do the CLI thing without CORBA. But I'd be
interested in any other options which people want to suggest.
Thanks
--tim
"Tim Bradshaw" <··········@tfeb.org> writes:
> *Ideally* I'd like something which doesn't require me to spend the rest
> of my life configuring GNU Emacs, or in fact any of my life at all
> configuring it - having weaned myself quite successfully off it after
> 20 years, I don't really want to go back there - and in any case there
> doesn't seem to be any reasonable Mac OS X port (not something that
> just uses X in other words).
You don't care about Emacs any more, but for the sake of lurkers, I'll
point out that the CVS version of GNU Emacs builds great on OS X out
of the box and does not require an X server. It's a real pity that for
whatever reason the official "release" of the next version of Emacs
has been so long delayed--the official releases are now I think a
couple years old and a ton of hacking has gone on in the meantime. So
the best way (IMO) to get an Emacs that Just Works on OS X is to check
out the latest from CVS, cd into the mac/ directory and run:
./make-package --self-contained
This will produce an Emacs.app that you can double click to run a
standard OS X installer that installs Emacs under /Applications/.
Folks who want an Emacs that behaves less like Emacs and more like a
Mac application may also want to check out Aquamacs. I can't
personally recommend it one way or the other as I want my Emacs to
behave like Emacs, thank you very much, so have never tried it.
-Peter
--
Peter Seibel * ·····@gigamonkeys.com
Gigamonkeys Consulting * http://www.gigamonkeys.com/
Practical Common Lisp * http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/
> You don't care about Emacs any more, but for the sake of lurkers, I'll
> point out that the CVS version of GNU Emacs builds great on OS X out
> of the box and does not require an X server.
Well, to some extent that makes my point: I want something that works
out of the box (mucking around with thousands of lines of .emacs gets a
bit wearing after a while, let alone patching & compiling it...), and
emacs is not really providing that on the Mac. That's really my fault
for choosing a Mac of course - it would all just be fine on Linux or
Windows. I was aware of this when I chose, in fact - it looked like if
I wanted a desktop Unixoid box with maximal working-out-of-the-box-ness
the Mac was clearly it, even if for some things (Emacs, really) it
might be much worse.
> Well, to some extent that makes my point: I want something that works
> out of the box (mucking around with thousands of lines of .emacs gets a
> bit wearing after a while, let alone patching & compiling it...), and
> emacs is not really providing that on the Mac. That's really my fault
> for choosing a Mac of course - it would all just be fine on Linux or Windows.
I find setting up Emacs much easier on MacOSX that it's on Windows
(either compiling it or finding a binary). You can download a Carbon
Emacs Package from http://homepage.mac.com/zenitani/emacs-e.html (it
even includes slime!)
If you want everything to work out of the box try Peter's Lispbox
(http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/lispbox/#download), available in
several flavours: acl, clisp, openmcl, sbcl
"Tim Bradshaw" <··········@tfeb.org> writes:
> > You don't care about Emacs any more, but for the sake of lurkers, I'll
> > point out that the CVS version of GNU Emacs builds great on OS X out
> > of the box and does not require an X server.
>
> Well, to some extent that makes my point: I want something that works
> out of the box (mucking around with thousands of lines of .emacs gets a
> bit wearing after a while, let alone patching & compiling it...), and
> emacs is not really providing that on the Mac. That's really my fault
> for choosing a Mac of course - it would all just be fine on Linux or
> Windows. I was aware of this when I chose, in fact - it looked like if
> I wanted a desktop Unixoid box with maximal working-out-of-the-box-ness
> the Mac was clearly it, even if for some things (Emacs, really) it
> might be much worse.
No, there is a very Mac-ified, batteries-included Emacs distribution
for OS X, Aquamacs Emacs, that has everything set up right. Aquamacs
Emacs + SBCL + SLIME is very easy to setup, and requires maybe two
lines in your .emacs. It's still an Emacs-based environment, which
maybe isn't what you want, but you can (finally!) have a reasonable
one, on the Mac, without mucking around with Emacs itself.
--
/|_ .-----------------------.
,' .\ / | Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! |
,--' _,' | Abolish the racist |
/ / | death penalty! |
( -. | `-----------------------'
| ) |
(`-. '--.)
`. )----'
"Tim Bradshaw" <··········@tfeb.org> writes:
>> You don't care about Emacs any more, but for the sake of lurkers, I'll
>> point out that the CVS version of GNU Emacs builds great on OS X out
>> of the box and does not require an X server.
>
> Well, to some extent that makes my point: I want something that
> works out of the box (mucking around with thousands of lines of
> .emacs gets a bit wearing after a while, let alone patching &
> compiling it...), and emacs is not really providing that on the Mac.
I'm missing where I said anything about mucking around with thousands
of lines of .emacs or patching anything. Yes, I admit that you have to
do a 'cvs co' instead of downloading a tarball and then you have to
run ./make_package --self-contained instead of tar xzf ... But other
than that it's the same. For that matter it's the same thing you'd
have to do any any other Unix to get an up-to-date Emacs.
> That's really my fault for choosing a Mac of course - it would all
> just be fine on Linux or Windows.
Actually in Linux it would be about the same if you want an up-to-date
Emacs. On Windows you could probably figure out how to build an up to
date one, if you have the appropriate development tools or you can
just suffer along with the now-several-year-old "official" release for
which you can get binaries.
> I was aware of this when I chose, in fact - it looked like if I
> wanted a desktop Unixoid box with maximal
> working-out-of-the-box-ness the Mac was clearly it, even if for some
> things (Emacs, really) it might be much worse.
I just don't get why you say that. But you can think what you want--I
just don't want lurkers to go away thinking that everyone finds
running Emacs on a Mac is some horrible chore. FWIW, when I put
together my Lispbox distros (largely Emacs based) the Mac version is
the *easiest* to deal with.
-Peter
--
Peter Seibel * ·····@gigamonkeys.com
Gigamonkeys Consulting * http://www.gigamonkeys.com/
Practical Common Lisp * http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/
Peter Seibel wrote:
> > I was aware of this when I chose, in fact - it looked like if I
> > wanted a desktop Unixoid box with maximal
> > working-out-of-the-box-ness the Mac was clearly it, even if for some
> > things (Emacs, really) it might be much worse.
>
> I just don't get why you say that. But you can think what you want--I
> just don't want lurkers to go away thinking that everyone finds
> running Emacs on a Mac is some horrible chore. FWIW, when I put
> together my Lispbox distros (largely Emacs based) the Mac version is
> the *easiest* to deal with.
I do not agree with the earlier criticisms of Lisp-on-Mac, but there
are a couple Mac specific gotchas I know of:
* Fink or Darwin Ports was a fairly bad idea when I tried it. These did
not seem to work as well as Debian's apt-get, though of course that can
change with time. (Of course, Debian appears to have the advantage of
Peter van Eynde, IIRC.)
* Macs aren't necessarily used by that many library maintainers; Mac
users are just more vocal maybe -- I remember Edi Weitz pointed out his
Lisp logs had roughly the same proportion of Mac users as the general
population, maybe 15% of visitors instead of 10% or something. That
means you may have to figure out the one little thing that keeps the
lib running on your Mac, when the maintainers don't have the resources
to test on one. This will be daunting to the person who doesn't know
about all this ASDF stuff, but otherwise probably not. So yesterday, a
cool object persistence lib had a couple problems like:
#+(and (or bsd freebsd) (not darwin macosx))
which were fairly simple to locate, after which the lib passed its
tests with flying colors.
Other gotchas are more general.
* Probably shouldn't use Slime tarball; download from CVS if you're
running SBCL (and probably other systems).
* Dealing with little issues can require some confidence. (Such as
fixing LOOP's indentation to fit your control-freak wishes. Or getting
an Info file to work without copying it to some magic directory; I
don't know why Emacs doesn't like doing that.)
* Installers are actually kinda disgusting things; but one advantage is
they make failure an absolute. If it's broke, it's broke. Whereas when
installing things manually, editing .profile/.emacs/.biteme files by
hand, you can start to blame yourself for making mistakes... and
ironically you might indeed have made little mistakes which cover a
more fundamental problem like having downloaded the Slime or Emacs
tarball instead of slurping CVS.
All that said, I find Mac+Emacs+SBCL+Slime to be a pleasant
combination. I haven't touched upon their advantages, which would be a
long list.
Tayssir
"Tayssir John Gabbour" <···········@yahoo.com> writes:
> Or getting an Info file to work without copying it to some magic
> directory; I don't know why Emacs doesn't like doing that.
C-u C-h i works for me.
Magnus
> I'm missing where I said anything about mucking around with thousands
> of lines of .emacs or patching anything.
You didn't, but I happen to have thousands of lines of emacs init which
breaks periodically because they change how things work in ways that
affect that stuff. For (say) LW, I never had more than about 5 lines
of editor-specific init stuff. Yes, I could just cut back my emacs init
files hugely, I agree but that in itself is work because I have
nonstandard bindings etc and my fingers know.
> Yes, I admit that you have to
> do a 'cvs co' instead of downloading a tarball and then you have to
> run ./make_package --self-contained instead of tar xzf ... But other
> than that it's the same. For that matter it's the same thing you'd
> have to do any any other Unix to get an up-to-date Emacs.
The difference is that on Linux or Solaris (not perhaps Windows) then
when I install the machine with suitable options (for solaris this
means asking for the SFW stuff, for Linux probably depends on distro),
then I will get a sufficiently-recent emacs and xemacs, both of which
support the machine's native window system adequately well. That is
not the case on the Mac.
> I just don't get why you say that. But you can think what you want--I
> just don't want lurkers to go away thinking that everyone finds
> running Emacs on a Mac is some horrible chore. FWIW, when I put
> together my Lispbox distros (largely Emacs based) the Mac version is
> the *easiest* to deal with.
See above. Out of the box means just that: bundled with the OS, or as
near as possible to that. The whole *reason* I got a mac was because
I've finally worked out that there are things I can better spend my
free time doing than playing with computers (I spend all my working
life doing stuff to them, I don't want to spend any more than that
:-)).
Sorry, I probably wasn't clear enough about how extreme my attitude is
nowadays by normal nerd standards: I realise not everyone thinks this
way - and I didn't for many years, but I finally got bored (to give you
some idea: I also don't use an MP3 player or a digital camera because
that is yet more stuff I'd have to do involving computers for which I'm
not being paid).
Your lispbox things may actually meet my requirements rather well in
fact :-)
--tim
"Tim Bradshaw" <··········@tfeb.org> writes:
> I want something that works
> out of the box (mucking around with thousands of lines of .emacs gets a
> bit wearing after a while, let alone patching & compiling it...), and
> emacs is not really providing that on the Mac.
Well, not really of the box, but close:
I set up a script once and just keep calling it once a month. The
script gets the newest version of Emacs from CVS, triggers a build
which in turn triggers a compile within Emacs and then installs
everything as an application on my OS X environment here. It's just
that simple.
If you're (or someone else is) interested just send me an Email (remove
NO SPAM from the email address shown in From:) and I will send the
script and some instructions.
As for .emacs - same story. Done once (over a year ago that I last
touched the config files) and now it's just there.
> That's really my fault
> for choosing a Mac of course - it would all just be fine on Linux or
> Windows. I was aware of this when I chose, in fact - it looked like if
> I wanted a desktop Unixoid box with maximal working-out-of-the-box-ness
> the Mac was clearly it, even if for some things (Emacs, really) it
> might be much worse.
Now that last sentence is beyond me ?!
All the best
Frank
On 2006-02-14 07:32:47 -0500, "Tim Bradshaw" <··········@tfeb.org> said:
>> You don't care about Emacs any more, but for the sake of lurkers, I'll
>> point out that the CVS version of GNU Emacs builds great on OS X out
>> of the box and does not require an X server.
>
> Well, to some extent that makes my point: I want something that works
> out of the box (mucking around with thousands of lines of .emacs gets a
> bit wearing after a while, let alone patching & compiling it...), and
> emacs is not really providing that on the Mac. That's really my fault
> for choosing a Mac of course - it would all just be fine on Linux or
> Windows. I was aware of this when I chose, in fact - it looked like if
> I wanted a desktop Unixoid box with maximal working-out-of-the-box-ness
> the Mac was clearly it, even if for some things (Emacs, really) it
> might be much worse.
Mac OS X is a great platform for Lisp development, and SBCL, GNU CL,
Allegro & Lisp Works all have Mac ports. You should get a carbonized
version of Emacs (Apple's website itself has a link to the latest
10.4.2 build with carbon) mentioned on this thread, and then for
password-less commits in CVS use SSHKeyChain which sits in your
menu-bar and actually controls your ssh-agent for you, and provides
security features like removing your ssh keys when your screensaver
activates or your computer sleeps.
SSHKeyChain + Carbon Emacs + SLIME + SBCL = the best Lisp environment
I've used to date.
Links
http://www.sshkeychain.org/
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/development_tools/emacsforosx.html
Finally, you seem rather confused about what OS X can do, so you should
browse the "Developer Tools" section of the Apple OS X website. If you
had, you would have found the Emacs, X-windows SDKs, and other goodies
you've asked about.
--
Brandon Werner
cl-semantic project administrator
http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-semantic/
http://www.brandonwerner.com
cl-semanic is a collection of RDF/OWL extraction and relationship
parsing macros written in Common Lisp.
i pensieri stretti & il viso sciolto
Brandon Werner wrote:
> Finally, you seem rather confused about what OS X can do, so you should
> browse the "Developer Tools" section of the Apple OS X website. If you
> had, you would have found the Emacs, X-windows SDKs, and other goodies
> you've asked about.
>
I think rather that I have been confusing about how little effort I'm
willing to put in. Sorry - I thought I'd made it clear in my previous
article. Lispbox and/or LW looks like the answer to my problems.
--tim
On 2006-02-13 16:59:05 -0500, "Tim Bradshaw" <··········@tfeb.org> said:
> I find myself largely stranded on a Mac (OS X 10.current, PPC) - I
> still have access to a Linux environment but it's a long way away - too
> slow to run GUIs over for anything but hack value, and it's probably
> going to get replaced by Solaris 10 x86 at some point anyway (by me).
>
> I don't actually write very much Lisp any more (or anything really,
> sigh) but I would like to revive my document preparation system, as
> Word is unthinkable & trying to write anything non-trivial in
> TiddlyWiki is not really much better. This system was written mostly
> in portable CL, though all the build stuff for it & a client/server
> interface which I used to drive it was LW based.
>
> So I'd like to get all this working on my Mac.
>
> *Ideally* I'd like something which doesn't require me to spend the rest
> of my life configuring GNU Emacs, or in fact any of my life at all
> configuring it - having weaned myself quite successfully off it after
> 20 years, I don't really want to go back there - and in any case there
> doesn't seem to be any reasonable Mac OS X port (not something that
> just uses X in other words). So something with a proper IDE would be
> better.
Just FYI, Aquamacs Emacs is a native Aqua Mac OS X Emacs (i.e., not X
windows) and it uses the standard Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts where
applicable in addition to the Emacs key chords as well of course:
<http://aquamacs.org/>
>
> It needs to be possible to talk to it (to a running image) from the
> command line - my existing thing uses CORBA, but I'm fine using
> whatever exists on the Mac.
>
> I have no religious objections to commercial systems (in fact rather
> the opposite) though the cheaper the better, obviously. In fact I'm
> entirely uninterested in arguments on grounds of ideology, so if you
> want to give these, don't.
>
> The closer to the standard the better. Vendor stability also a mild
> issue I guess.
>
> I *think* that these constraints point me at one of MCL or LW, though I
> think that LW enterprise is out of my price bracket for now, so I'd
> need to work out how to do the CLI thing without CORBA. But I'd be
> interested in any other options which people want to suggest.
Short answer: LispWorks.
Longer answser: looks to have better prospects for long term vendor
survival. Can be used either from the command line, or with a native
Aqua/Cocoa GUI IDE, or with an X windows IDE (I know, you don't want X
- I'm just mentioning it for completeness). There's a trial version
available so you can give it a test drive before buying.
Raffael Cavallaro wrote:
>
> Short answer: LispWorks.
> Longer answser: looks to have better prospects for long term vendor
> survival. Can be used either from the command line, or with a native
> Aqua/Cocoa GUI IDE, or with an X windows IDE (I know, you don't want X
> - I'm just mentioning it for completeness). There's a trial version
> available so you can give it a test drive before buying.
Thanks, that was my inclination too. I'm pretty familiar with LW on
Windows & Linux - presumably it's basically the same interface except
with some macization?
--tim
On 2006-02-14 07:35:00 -0500, "Tim Bradshaw" <··········@tfeb.org> said:
> Thanks, that was my inclination too. I'm pretty familiar with LW on
> Windows & Linux - presumably it's basically the same interface except
> with some macization?
Near as I can tell. Others who use both actively can give you more
details - the last time I used the windows version regularly was a
couple of years ago.
For apps that you write, CAPI UI code written for one platform
generally runs identically on both of the others, so it seems fairly
uniform across the board. There's also a nice interface to the Mac OS X
Objective-C runtime if you want platform native functionality for
certain things rather than the LCD cross-platform widgets of CAPI.
regards