Monday, June 23, 2008

Factor and Emacs!

As previously mentioned, I've been working on an implementation of Lisp in Factor. Although it's been tough, progress is being made. However, I'm taking a short break from that to work on something just as fun - writing a (better) factor-mode for emacs.

While Factor does come with a factor mode (in factor.el), it has some warts that I don't really like. For one, it doesn't support customization (via customize-group). I'm also not too fond of it's font-lock (that is, syntax highlighting) support, so I'm working on fixing that too. Once I get that working, I'm also going to add some factor-specific movement functions, and prehaps the ability to look up definitions of words and the like. I'd really like to have eldoc-like display of the stack effect of the factor word at point. That would probably entail having a nice inferior-factor mode too, which should be entertaining.

That's it for now!

So yeah, just a quick summary of what I'm up to now. Emacs is just so much fun, not only to write code in, but to write code for! Next time I write, I'll hopefully have made more progress on both factor-mode and extra/lisp.

2 comments:

Alexander Solovyov said...

I have almost finished indentation for factor-mode, and I just need to set some exceptions and it'll be usable. I've said that just to make sure we wouldn't intersect with our work. :)

P.S. I'm piranha in #concatenative.

James said...

piranha:
I haven't actually been able to do much with factor-mode recently, but I'm focusing mainly on better font-lock for now, so there shouldn't be much overlap.