Earlier this week I merged the gEDA Scheme API that I've been working on since late 2009 into the main gEDA unstable branch. It's been a pretty great chunk of work, and I'm glad to have been able to get it into a state where it's generally useful. It's been pretty fun working out how to answer users' feature requests on gEDA-user with a short Scheme function, too! Hopefully people will take this new feature and do cool things with it.
One of the main obstacles to doing cool things with the new Scheme API is that it's difficult to modify key bindings on the fly — gschem doesn't have any equivalent to Emacs' global-set-key, for example. That makes it hard for e.g. an rc file or Scheme plugin loaded after system-gschemrc to add new keybindings or modify existing ones. There's also only a single keymap, so there's no possibility for user-modifiable state-specific keymaps (e.g. for binding keys that the user presses while placing a symbol).
While on the subject of keybindings, the way gschem currently displays keybindings in the menu bar is a little bit rubbish — for example, it would be good to display "]" instead of "bracketright", and "o S" instead of "oShift S". It's also a shame that we don't support a wider range of modifier keys, including "super" ("⊞" on most keyboards).
I'm planning to fix all these issues by adding a comprehensive set of Scheme functions for working with keys, key sequences and key bindings to gschem. Keymaps will probably become a hashtable-based record type, and there will be functions for creating a key sequence from a string and vice versa. There will also be a function for obtaining a "pretty" string describing a key, suitable for displaying in a menu or in the status line.
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