Re: A femtolisp based emacs clone

[edu500ac]

Interesting enough, my first idea was to develop a modern clone of the 
screen-editor, as you have suggested. Therefore, I contacted the owner of the 
site se-editor.org and asked him whether it would be difficult to add utf8 to 
his distribution. The answer was that he did not have time and will for doing 
the job. However, I wrote a clone of the screen-editor in Haskell. The problem 
with my Haskell screen-editor clone is that Haskell is very hard to install. 
Then I found atto, an emacs clone written by Hugh Barney. It had the same 
limitation as the screen-editor, but Hugh Barney was willing to add unicode and 
parenthesis highlight to atto. The only thing missing was a language for 
customization. The choice of languages narrowed to Tiny Scheme and femtolisp. 
Since femtolisp is much faster than Tiny Scheme, almost every member of the 
group voted for femtolisp. To make a long story short, the femtoemacs team 
members aims at something similar to the screen-editor. However, they think 
that it would be a bonus if some compatibility with emacs could be retained.

Conclusion: All team members agree with your post in almost every aspect. The 
problems you listed are exactly the problems we have.