General comments
I have some general comments about this package and didn't see a better place to leave them so I'll just add them here. I actually saw your post on reddit about this but that thread is locked.
First of all, thanks for creating this. Overall, it's very useful and exactly what I was looking for to allow me to use emacs for cross dev in BASIC on VICE.
After spending some time getting all the features working, I've made the following observations:
- flycheck - This mode really isn't that useful for a couple of reasons: one, all the errors I tried to produce had the same fairly useless message about "missing colon :" So,
bas
doesn't appear to be that smart. Two, no matter where the syntax error occurs, only the last line of the code is visually marked; For example, if you have code on lines 10, 20 and 30 and the error is on line 10 then the error text will mention the correct line but visually only line 30 will be marked with a red>>
in the margin. Finally, having to maintain another executable,bas
just for this feature isn't optimal, especially since you've hard-coded it into the mode assuming it's available globally. I think it would be best if this mode wasn't enabled by default and left up to the user to decide if they want it on or not. - cbmbasic - For developing specifically in a C64 environment, this mode also isn't useful for me since it requires all code to be in uppercase; However, VICE and, more specifically, the
petcat
tool requires code to be in lowercase so that it's converted to the correct character set. Converting back and forth b/t upper and lower case is just annoying. I just can't think of why I'd ever want to use this when I can just run the code directly on VICE. - VICE integration - This is fantastic and, for me, the real point of using this minor-mode.
The requirements list is pretty long and it's not immediately clear why so many packages are needed. It would be nice to see many of them (like flycheck, cbmbasic and bas) moved to an "optional" section or something.
Anyways, thanks for putting this together.