Re: lisp newbie help (semi long)

[John Harper <jsh unfactored org>]

On Oct 9, 2003, at 1:37 PM, Bret Hughes wrote:
> What I want to do first is find a window that has a certain string in
> the title, and do something, say print its name.

(get-window-by-name "NAME")

will find the first window called NAME. If you want to do substring 
searching you need to use get-window-by-name-re, which searches using a 
regular expression rather than just a string

> what I can't do is figure out the sytnax to iterate through the list 
> and
> print the names (something that seemed a reasonable starting point.)

there are a number of ways to iterate over a list in rep, mapc/mapcar, 
while, let, do

(mapc (lambda (x) (do-something-with x)) my-list)

(let ((x my-list))
  (while x
    (do-something-with (car x))
    (setq x (cdr x)))

(let loop ((rest my-list))
  (when rest
    (do-something-with (car rest))
    (loop (cdr rest)))

(do ((rest my-list (cdr rest))
    ((null rest))
  (do-something-with (car rest)))

stylistically the first is probably the cleanest when there are no side 
effects, but they all have their uses..

for printing strings in sawfish you can use the display-message 
function, it creates a small window and puts some text in it, e.g. 
(display-message "hello, world")

	John