Friday, September 12, 2008

Nekthuth - Making Vim Love Lisp

My friend DieMumiee pointed me to a project call Nekthuth that is supposed to be a mini-version of slime, just for my beloved Vim. The web-site looks promising, there are even screenshots and short, but good documentation. Using it it's quite easy to get Nekthuth installed and getting started.


However, my current SBCL is kinda broken. Dunno what I did to it, but after an apt-get update it segfaulted while compiling some scripts and just seems defective. I tried Nekthuth anyways, just to experience a broken pipe. Ouch. :-(


So you're invited to test it out and send reports to me and the original author. I'm quite interested in whether this project could become at least a partial slime-replacement and drive more Lispers to use Vim, and make Lisp available to Vimmers.

Monday, September 1, 2008

Google's own browser: Chrome

I usualy don't like blogging about a blog-post, but I'll make an exception for this one:


Philipp Lenssen writes in his blog that he received a comic-book from Google that describes a new, upcoming browser called Chrome. You can read about everything announced in his blog-post. IMHO there's nothing special mentioned in the list, nothing that hasn't been done before. Probably the most "exciting" thing about Chrome is that the tabs are above the address-bar, which basically makes no difference, but looks different to all the other browsers.


My guess about some technical details about Chrome is that it is built using WebKit as it's back-end. More specifically, using QtWebKit from the new Qt 4.4 release. As Google has been a customer of Trolltech for Google Earth and maybe other tools before, QtWebKit is just the best tool to build a browser from-scratch.


Because usually Google-tools are high-quality and sometimes even revolutionary, we probably can expect more than has been mentioned in the comic from the browser. Nobody will give away his secrets before launch, anyways.


Update:There is coverage of this on heise, too: Google Chrome: Google greift Microsoft mit eigenem Browser an, but it's a bit too focused on Internet Explorer, imho. Some more interesting things about the relation of Google to the Mozilla Foundation, how it evolved and how Google Chrome might change it, can be found here. In this article I've been proven right that they use WebKit as their rendering engine. No word on Qt, though. The probably most interesting thing about Chrome is separating browser tabs in individual processes.