New release of peppy, my attempt to kick the XEmacs habit. I'm
dogfooding now, and having two weeks of editing itself with itself,
I'm happy with its stability.
The feature that really made it comfortable to switch from XEmacs was,
interestingly, M-x find-file, which uses the minibuffer, tab
completion, and some modifications to the textctrl_autocomplete
control to load files. Tab also scrolls through the list of available
choices.
The thing I miss the most is M-x fill-paragraph. If anyone's got a
good algorithm for that, I'm happy to include it. 
Still working on features from sources like Robin's blog and comments,
and other requests. New features include:
* M-x processing -- all actions are available through named
equivalents. Try M-X <tab> to get the list of currently available
actions. (M-X is equivalent to Alt-X for people not familiar to
emacs.) Emacs style lower-case-with-dash aliases are available for
most commands
* Updated STC styling from Editra (www.editra.org) -- wrote an adapter
around Editra's styling dialog and am now using all the lexer and
style information from that project. Cody Precord has gone to a lot
of work to create a mapping of scintilla styling information to a
common style sheet specification. All related syntactic entities are
styled in the same manner regardless of language. Make a change in
the comment color, for instance, and it is reflected in all languages.
Cody's got support for over 40 of scintilla's language lexers, and
I'm going to be tracking his progress from now on. He's done too much
good work for me to reinvent that wheel.
* Thanks to the suggestion of Peter Damoc, you can run scripts from
within the editor, capturing the standard out/error to a logging minor
mode window. You can also run multiple scripts at the same time.
* Integrated Stani Michiels' fold explorer as a replacement for custom
class browsers. It doesn't update itself in response to your typing,
so there's plenty of work to do, but at least it shows what's possible
without knowing anything about the syntax of the language. I suspect
major modes will start from this information and then do a little
additional scanning to fully populate the class browser
* Session saving plugin that can save and load the buffers shown in
all the top level windows.
* Created a tutorial plugin (in peppy/plugins/tutorial_plugin.py) that
demonstrates how to add new actions and minor modes. I'm still
debating an architectural change to major modes that has kept me from
writing up a full tutorial on creating a major mode, but you can look
at peppy/plugins/makefile_mode.py for a simple example or
peppy/plugins/python_mode.py for a non-trivial example.
* Still no towers of hanoi, but I did add hangman from the wxPython
samples -- it uses the current buffer as the source for its words.
Lots of work still to do. I also find a buffer list mode very useful,
so that will be coming soon. M-x describe-* would be nice. Context
menus. Menus on notebook tabs to close tabs, open a new tab, show
related files, ...
I'm also in the market for good reindent code. The idea is that each
major mode will provide its own implementation of reindent, electric
return, etc. or fall back to the superclass implementation. For my
python mode my current code tries to handle the complicated cases
rather than just indenting to the previous line, but ends up getting
confused at a lot of things emacs gets right.
Feedback welcome! After closing off my trac ticket creationg because
of huge amounts of trac spam, I'm trying to see if simple math
problems are enough to keep the spambots away. Anonymous ticket
creation at http://trac.flipturn.org is again available.
Thanks,
Rob
