ESA: A CLIM Library for Writing Emacs-Style Applications Robert Strandh Troels Henriksen LaBRI, Université Bordeaux 1 DIKU, University of Copenhagen 351, Cours de la Libération Universitetsparken 1, Copenhagen 33405 Talence Cedex
[email protected] France
[email protected] David Murray Christophe Rhodes ADMurray Associates Goldsmiths, University of London 10 Rue Carrier Belleuse, 75015 Paris New Cross Road, London, SE14 6NW
[email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT style applications. The central distinguishing feature of an We describe ESA (for Emacs-Style Application), a library Emacs-style application, for our purposes, is that it uses for writing applications with an Emacs look-and-feel within short sequences of keystrokes as the default method of in- the Common Lisp Interface Manager. The ESA library voking commands, and only occasionally requires the user to takes advantage of the layered design of CLIM to provide a type the full name of the command in a minibuffer. A spe- command loop that uses Emacs-style multi-keystroke com- cial keystroke (M-x) is used to invoke commands by name. mand invocation. ESA supplies other functionality for writ- This interaction style is substantially different from the one ing such applications such as a minibuffer for invoking ex- provided by CLIM by default, and therefore required us to tended commands and for supplying command arguments, write a different CLIM top level. Fortunately, CLIM was Emacs-style keyboard macros and numeric arguments, file designed to make this not only possible but fairly straight- and buffer management, and more. ESA is currently used forward, as the implementation of a replacement top level in two major CLIM applications: the Climacs text editor can build on the protocol layers beneath, just as the default (and the Drei text gadget integrated with the McCLIM im- top level is built.