I‘m sitting in a local coffee-shop with free wireless internet (Northern Espresso Cafe, Blaine, MN on 109th Ave; great place!), and doing a little homework.
I just didn’t feel like setting up emacs, but I emerged mit-scheme and found that using tabs in gnome-terminal, you can get the same functionality that I’ve been using emacs for, without emacs. Keep in mind, all I’m really doing with emacs is switching back and forth between a file buffer (whatver.scm) and a scheme buffer.
Gnome-terminal (the default xterm on the GNOME desktop) allows you to have multiple tabs, each with their own bash process. So, all I did was start mit-scheme from one tab (it starts with the command “scheme”), then open a separate tab and write a “Hello world!” file in nano (pico-clone text editor) to test it out. (”Hello world” programs are essential computer science projects.) Save the file, go back to the tab where scheme is running and do (load “hello.scm”) like you normally would, and as long as you saved your file in the same directory that you started scheme in, you’re all set.
Not that there’s anything wrong with emacs, but I simply don’t use 99% of the features it offers, and I like the simplicity of nano.
What I usually have is two horizontally-divided buffers open when I’m working on scheme code. The top buffer with my code, and the bottom one with the scheme environment (started with M-x run-scheme RET). I type in some code, jump to the closing paren, and hit C-x C-e to evaluate it in the other buffer.
I have the code and the output in one window.
I do like that idea, being able to see the code and run it at once; I could accomplish that by opening two xterm windows, but doing both in emacs does seem a little more elegant.