Hello, Lispworksers,

I'm evaluating the possibility of using Lispworks for most of my
system interaction (editing, coding, and shell, though no plans to
replace my mailer or news reader or web browser).  I've "admired LW
from afar", if you will, but could never put together a good enough
use-case to buy it, since I don't use Lisp commercially, but adding "a
fully-compiled CL-based multi-threaded CAPI-enabled Emacs-clone" to
the mix pushed me over the edge (possibly in more ways than one :).
Using LW in this way seems about as close as I could get to a Lisp
Machine on my Linux box.

I'm a Vimmer from way back, so the differences with Emacs don't bother
me (and I wouldn't notice them anyway).

I have some questions, if you have some time:

o Does anyone else do this?  If not, why not?  LW seems to have many
  of the benefits of Emacs, with few of the drawbacks -- it's fully
  compiled, it's in CL, it's multi-threaded, it has CAPI and CLIM.
  The only minuses I can see is that it doesn't have the vast array of
  add-ons or vast user community that Emacs has, and it costs a bit
  more, which makes it difficult to use on other people's systems.
  But if you already have it, why not at least use it on your own
  system?
o Do any other major modes exist?  I do a lot of Perl and shell script
  for work, and wondered if anyone has written major modes for them.
o The LW "remote shell" command uses rsh.  How do I change it to use
  ssh?  Alternatively, how can I get the help system to tell me how to
  do that?  :)
o You get the source to "the editor" when you get a commercial
  license.  Is that *only the editor* or the entire Lispworks IDE?
  Just curious.
o I have some ideas for making remote system interaction easier.
  Basically instead of logging in to a remote system and running a
  shell/editor/what-have-you, you'd run an agent on the system, and
  get it to run commands for you and send you the output, and send and
  receive files more-or-less transparently (for editing and so forth).
  Kind of like Swank, only for system interaction instead of Lisp
  interaction.  Has anyone else done anything like this?  Would anyone
  be interested in using the code if I get a moderately functional
  proof-of-concept put together?  (Even if the agent is not written in
  Lisp?)

Thank you for your time!

-- Larry Clapp