silent-entertainment
commented
3 years ago Last night, I worked on migrating from the cl-notebook to the claxiom namespace. I used grep and sed with surgical precision, to rename the system name, package names, URIs, etc. However, there was an issue with the default notebook at ~/.claxiom/books/_notebook. The default _notebook is now broken for some reason that I haven't been able to determine. Starting (claxiom:main) has the usual buttons on the bottom, but the rest of the page is blank. Opening a new notebook by pointing to a non-existing file seems to work, but then the New Cell button does nothing.
I re-cloned the pre-migration claxiom repo for further exploration. I'm finding that the pre-existing interface is quite mysterious, as well as buggy, and I'm going to have to look more closely at the code to try to grok what is undocumented.
I've also been exploring darkmatter, which is a similar application. I had looked at darkmatter before I forked cl-notebook to resurrect it as claxiom. darkmatter seems much more polished than cl-notebook was before it was seemingly abandoned. The interface has a menu bar, in contrast to the context widget that is adjacent to the current cell in cl-notebook, and the menu items reveal corresponding keyboard shortcuts. It is very convenient to have a context menu that is local to the cell, to have the tool available where you're working, but the cl-notebook implementation of it has a few issues that require attention. Darkmatter also has a symbol navigator. Darkmatter just seems to work better than cl-notebook, or maybe it's just more user-friendly without documentation. However,, darkmatter has only two cell types (markdown and code), so it doesn't have the lispy html markup cell or the parenscript cell that cl-notebook gives us. The interface of darkmatter has a couple of quirks that might be related to undocumented features, which dissuaded me from using it as a base for claxiom because the interface of 'cl-notebookseemed to smooth it out, though now I'm discovering that the implementation of that smoothness is rather buggy or just unpredictable. Also,darkmatteruses theacejavascript editor and 'paredit, whereas cl-notebook uses CodeMirror and pareditesque for that functionality.
The other issue that complicates either using darkmatter as a base or merging its code into claxiom for its features is that it mixes so many languages, instead of leveraging available common lisp libraries that provide the same functionality in common lisp syntax. Instead of writing the html interface in cl-who (for example) and the the project-specific client code in parenscript, the html is in html [template] files, and the javascript is in javascript files. The thought of dealing with the multiple syntaxes for even a relatively small code base is very unappealing to me, as I've elucidated in README., because as the code base grows the potential for other issue grow, too.
Im not sure what the best strategy might be here. I'm going to have to study the code bases.
As I mention in the installation note re
ql:quickload, in the project README the system and package will be migrated from cl-notebook to claxium, to eliminate conflict with cl-notebook, in case anyone has or wants both systems, since claxiom is distinct from cl-notebook.I'm placing this task at the top of the list of priorities and will get on it ASAP.