[chuck-users] chuck shell...

[Kassen]

Kurt;

> Those abandoned shell plans you mention sound awesome. I hope someday (maybe
> with more and more people live coding) the shell becomes a priority again.

I suspect that part of the issue is that many people who now start
working/playing with chuck never saw a CLI before. For these people
the mini will be a lot more easy to use than shell. If shell were to
grow to "be all it could be" we'd have something like a miniture vi or
EMACS on our hands. I'd love that, you would, probably a dozen or so
other people would and I think many young students starting out with
their first code and beeps would hide under the nearest couch.

I strongly suspect (but I have no proof) that most people will want
icons, a mouse and so on, and really; the mini does work quite well.

What I would advocate for the future of interacting with running ChucK
code would be having all of that controllable straight from the
commandline, then make the mini use hooks to that (this is already
what is going on and why we can update ChucK, recompile the mini, and
expect it to work). From there on people could write extensions to
editors like vi and EMACS or even borrow the Fluxus "scratchpad"
(simple but it looks good...) and use what they like. I don't think
that highlighting a certain block of text in the mini would need to be
that different from navigating scope from the shell (as outlined in
those rather old plans), the hard but there is making it work at all.

Unless I'm mistaken, the one way to get data into the shell (for
example code) is to type it in there yourself. I don't think we can
have other programs do this for us. To me that makes it a bit of a
dead end. People like us will be so picky about what makes a good
editor that even the few who would prefer this scenario wouldn't agree
on it. Then again; I would actually like to be able to reconfigure
parts of the mini using ChucK code and I do think that would be a nice
idea so maybe I have no right to talk about what is and isn't sensible
in this :-).

At least we have Spencer; all of Spencer's ideas on editing ChucK so
far turned out to be good ones, I feel.

Yours,
Kas.