Overview

The SchemeScript plug-in adds a powerful Scheme source code editor to the Eclipse platform.

Goal

The initial goal of this plug-in was to provide a robust, industrial-strength Scheme editor for the Eclipse platform. Eclipse is a state-of-the-art environment for Java development and is highly extensible. Unfortunately, at the time this project started, there was no good Scheme editor available. So we decided to write one. The main inspiration for SchemeScript is, of course, Emacs. But also a few other proprietary Lisp editors the authors worked with.

So the question is: what makes a good Scheme editor? The answer is simple: it must make Scheme programming fun, not tedious. Since Scheme source code is exclusively made of S-expressions, it must be optimized for the editing and handling of S-expressions. The main ingredients are thus:

• Parenthesis matching (of course) to highlight the corresponding closing/opening parenthesis;
• Automatic indentation - indentation is what makes Scheme source code readable;
• S-expression-based movements/selection;
• Code completion;
• interaction with an interpreter.

SchemeScript provides all this, and more. Also, almost all features are fully configurable, so one can adapt SchemeScript to its particular needs.

Configuration

All key sequences described in this document are fully configurable. To change a key configuration:

• open the Preferences page,
• select the Workbench/Keys section,
• select the "Scheme Editing" category in the "Command" section,
• choose the command name,
• add or remove key sequences.

Acknowledgments

This work has been partly sponsored by:

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