Re: Guile Studio's goals (and home)

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi!

> • What are Guile Studio's goals?

The pretentiously named “Guile Studio” arose from the observation that
we often tell new Guile users to learn how to use Emacs first in order
to get a comfortable Guile development experience.  Since Emacs has
really quirky defaults that don’t mesh with the expectations of people
who learn a new programming language, this can be so discouraging
that the person abandons the initial goal of learning Guile.

Many people in the past had the idea to “fix” Emacs.  “Guile Studio” is
not intended to be yet another Emacs starter kit like Prelude, Doom, or
Spacemacs.  Instead it tries to focus on just Guile, going as far as to
remove “Emacs” from the window title and the menus.

My goal was to provide a friendly editor that does not require any
configuration to use and play with Guile.  You install Guile Studio and
get started right away.  It tries to be what Dr Racket is for Racket and
what RStudio is for R.

This is why Guile Studio comes with the picture language and immediately
spawns a Geiser session where it can be used.  It hides Emacs clutter
from the menus and adds menu items that are relevant to new Guile users,
such as a link to the Guile manual.  It aims to handle documentation
buffers specially to avoid the confusion that comes with Emacs-typical
“buffer clutter”.  It uses CUA key bindings to avoid annoying surprises.

Everything that serves to avoid confusion is welcome in Guile Studio.

> • What is its relationship with the GNU Guile project?

There is none.  I’m just a Guile enthusiast who thought that Guile
Studio would be a good thing to build.

> • The homepage field in the Guix package points to GNU Guile's
> website. Should I send future questions and issues to Guile's lists
> and issue tracker?

I don’t know.  Whether to use the Guile bug tracker is up for the Guile
maintainers to decide.  I think it’s fine to use the guile-user list,
though.  I’m subscribed to guile-user.

> • Current Guile Studio version is 0.0.2. Any plans for a future version?

Once Emacs 27 is released I’ll probably have to adjust a few things.
Perhaps I’ll also configure the use of tabs then.

There are many more things that could be done to improve the experience
(buffer handling is still a big pain point; documentation needs to be
better integrated, etc), but I don’t think I can spend as much time on
this as I used to.  I’ll gladly discuss and merge patches, though.

Thank you for your interest in Guile Studio!

--
Ricardo