Re: Editing Scheme in the installation image

[Mike Gran]

On Thursday, January 5, 2017 3:05 PM, Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hello Guix!

> One issue that’s often reported is that it’s inconvenient to edit the
> config file with all its parentheses in the installation image given the
> available options (Zile, Nano, and nvi).

> Something like Paredit and ‘show-paren-mode’ in Emacs would help avoid
> mistakes such as unbalanced parenthesis.  However ‘emacs-minimal’ takes
> 180 MiB and it would be unreasonable to include it.

> So I figured we could use Zile-on-Guile¹ (yes!) and extend it to have
> something that resembles Paredit, like:


> Of course, it takes more than these few lines to write a real Paredit,
> but still, wouldn’t it be cool?  :-)

> What do people (Mike in particular!) think?
Could work, but, there are caveats.
This Zile fork, and upstream Zile, have characters restricted to 8-bits
in most places.  It also will not do any bi-directional characters
or double-width characters.  For non-ASCII config files, Zile-on-Guile
might be too limited.
The functions expressed in Scheme in Zile-on-Guile are the same
as upstream Zile had.  It is a fairly limited set.
Zile-on-Guile is a Scheme, not an elisp, even though the functions
it expresses have elisp-like names. So there is little portability
between Emacs and this Zile.
But, for me, putting together Zile-on-Guile was a fun project.  It would
be cool to see it used for something.  I guess if somebody were
actually going to use it, it would need a better home than my GitHub.
I could probably help out, as time permits.
-Mike