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Arc Welder - wannabe IDE
9 points by conanite 5997 days ago | 3 comments
Arc Welder is a little text editor written in arc, using rainbow and java's swing libraries to provide graphics. So far, it boasts

  - syntax highlighting
  - paren matching (amazing how much little things matter)
  - context help (with the cursor on a symbol, hit f1 to show help gathered by anarki's help system)
  - htmlification so you can easily post arc snippets to your blog
  - pretty print (using pprint.arc shipped with arc)
  - eval selection
Colorizing is slow, painfully so for large files. It could be argued that this encourages the good practice of writing short files. But I would like it to be faster.

It's still full of bugs, and hangs sometimes (especially if you have unbalanced parens. It's pre-alpha, pre-preview software. It might eat all your files.

It has no search function, and needs a heap of other stuff too. What's important for experienced lisp users in an IDE? I've been hooked on intellij for the last 5 years so I'm spoilt ...

I've posted instructions for building and running welder at http://github.com/conanite/rainbow/wikis/home , which I'll update as it changes.



7 points by almkglor 5996 days ago | link

> What's important for experienced lisp users in an IDE?

Paren balancing. This summarizes all the prophets. All else is commentary.

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2 points by conanite 5989 days ago | link

the good news is that it doesn't hang any more on unbalanced parens. In fact, it highlights them in bright red! What i'd like though is auto-insert of right-parens, and auto-surround selected text. textmate does this and it's really nice, it seems dr scheme doesn't. It's really convenient for turning (expr) into (do (expr) ...)

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0 points by schtog 5991 days ago | link

True, without paren-mathcing programming lisp is teh horrors, with it it is a piece of cake.

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