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Am I missing something or you guys are nuts?!
1 point by alimoeeny 4954 days ago | 8 comments
I left windows a couple of years ago and I have lived and worked in one or another Unix like OS since and never looked back. The only thing that I am REALLY missing is Visual Studio, I looked to see if I can find a decent IDE in my new life to replace VS at least to some extent but so far has been out of luck. I can live with that, I have found my way around debugging python and learned to use emacs and Xcode and eclipse and ... but developing arc is a pain! I mean I enjoy the new way of thinking and the new aproach to the old problems but implementing them is a real pain (I test some small pices on tryarc.org to get them right!). What do you guys do?


4 points by fallintothis 4953 days ago | link

http://arclanguage.org/item?id=10986

http://arclanguage.org/item?id=11627

Personally, I use Vim (efficient text editing), Yakuake (shell is an F12 away), and rlwrap (make bad REPLs good!) for, well, really any language I use. Specifically for Arc, I wrote a Vim syntax highlighter & ftplugin: http://arclanguage.org/item?id=10147. Also, it's useful to

  alias arc='pushd ~/arc &> /dev/null; rlwrap -q"\"" mzscheme -f as.scm; popd &> /dev/null'

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3 points by akkartik 4953 days ago | link

Here's what my as.scm has to remove the need for the pushd/popd:

  (define arc-dir* (getenv "ARC"))
  (define start-dir* (path->string (current-directory)))
  (current-directory arc-dir*)

  (require mzscheme)

  ... ; other requires from as.scm

  (current-directory start-dir*)

  (tl)
Now all I have to do is setup $ARC in my shell startup, and I can run arc from anywhere and load source files transparently from the current directory.

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1 point by akkartik 4951 days ago | link

I went to push this idea to anarki, but it turns out there's already magic to call arc from anywhere:

  (parameterize ((current-directory (current-load-relative-directory)))
    (aload "arc.arc")
    (aload "libs.arc"))

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1 point by akkartik 4953 days ago | link

Is this the right Yakuake? http://yakuake.uv.ro/?page_id=6 Can you elaborate on what it buys you?

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1 point by fallintothis 4953 days ago | link

Yeah, that's the right one. More "officially", http://yakuake.kde.org/ leads you through some links until you finally get to its KDE-Apps page at http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=29153. But you'd probably just get it from your distro's package repository, anyway. For instance, I'm on Debian right now, and the package description does the elaboration for me, so:

  $ apt-cache show yakuake | grep -A7 -m1 "Description:"
  Description: a Quake-style terminal emulator based on KDE Konsole technology
   YaKuake is inspired from the terminal in the Quake game: when you press a key
   (by default F12, but that can be changed) a terminal window slides down from
   the top of the screen. Press the key again, and the terminal slides back.
   .
   It is faster than a keyboard shortcut because it is already loaded into memory
   and as such is very useful to anyone who frequently finds themselves switching
   in and out of terminal sessions.

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2 points by evanrmurphy 4953 days ago | link

I keep getting surprised by how much setup matters for my own programming satisfaction. Hacking Arc became a great deal less frustrating for me once I was introduced to rlwrap, and then the possibility of an in-editor REPL for emacs using inferior-arc-mode.

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1 point by alimoeeny 4953 days ago | link

I didn't know about rlwrap! it's relief! At least now I can begin to work.

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1 point by evanrmurphy 4952 days ago | link

I'm glad it's working out for you!

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