Important message to calva-friends: https://github.com/BetterThanTomorrow/calva/issues/267

calva-friends: I need help assessing a possible replacement of the REPL window. I'm currently looking at the option described in this issue: https://github.com/bhauman/rebel-readline/issues/194 Please check it out and see if you can help shed some light on it for me.

I don't know how much sense ^ that ^ makes for people. CC @bozhidar who might be able to shoot the idea down at just a glance.

@pez I think that’s not a good idea, as it doesn’t support nREPL integration (yet). It also uses a legacy version of the cljs var info lookup. I’m not saying it’s not doable, but I think it’s going to be harder than you expect it to be.

Thanks! I was more thinking of using it as a library.

But how would you benefit from a terminal-readline library in an editor? CIDER doesn’t use the Emacs standard library for terminals and just implements everything from scratch. The entire codebase is not much and we get the freedom to do whatever we want.

Yeah, that's sort of what I do today as well. But Emacs allows you to use the buffers, right? With VS Code that is not possible, so I have this entire editor in a webview and it is causing me major maintenance pain.

Ah, yeah. I didn’t think of this. In Emacs the REPL is just a special buffer, nothing more.

The other day someone asked for VIM key bindings and it is just to much work. If I could instead use a special editor, like you do in Emacs I would have those use cases covered. Maybe I should instead ask for that to be allowed in VS Code instead. It has these special editors (called virtual documents), but they are read only.

But, in any case. Rebel readline is a terminal readline, which might be or not be what I need. Depending on what that Extension Terminal API really is about. So I should start experimenting with that before looking for readline libraries. 😃

Indeed. 🙂