Started work on binding functions. Not yet complete.

docs/State-of-play.md

@@ -24,7 +24,35 @@ The answer, dear reader, is that Emacs is determined to get in my way in every p
 
 #### Eclipse
 
-When I finally switched away from using Emacs for everything 
+When I finally switched away from using Emacs for everything, sometime around 2000, I tried a number of things and ended up with [Eclipse](https://eclipseide.org/), which was at the time a fairly simple but fairly solid Java oriented integrated development environment (IDE). I stayed with Eclipse then for about a decade; but when I moved to mainly developing in Clojure, Eclipse just didn't do Clojure very well, I switched back to Emacs for a while, was driven mad by it again, and found LightTable as a blissful release; which takes us back to the beginning of this section. 
+
+Last month, when I was searching for something to replace VSCodium and had realised once again how much I hate using Emacs for serious development, I tried Eclipse.
+
+It's... not awful? It's become a very polished, very configurable IDE; it has excellent facilities for C development. But I found it intrusively over-helpful: its continual 'helpful' suggestions got in my way. I used it for about ten days.  I wasn't enjoying it. But what made me give up on it was because it won't follow your configured desktop colour theme, and I wasn't able to find a dark-mode theme for it that worked for me: there are plenty of themes , but they are only applied to the editing panels, not to the chrome or to any of the other panels. I find white backgrounds really unpleasant on my eyes.
+
+#### KDevelop and Gnome Builder
+
+I know I tried [KDevelop](https://kdevelop.org/) at some stage in this process. I can't remember why I rejected it. There's probably a reason. I also tried [Gnome Builder](https://apps.gnome.org/en-GB/Builder/) and rejected it very quickly, again I can't remember why; having a wee play with it just now it feels quite nice, and I may have another try. However, the Debian package of Gnome Builder [does not include the help files](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1111418), and, without them, I haven't found out how to invoke the debugger.
+
+#### Basic text editors
+
+I obviously have a basic text editor, [gedit](https://gedit-text-editor.org/), on my system. It does C syntax highlighting very well, but doesn't do code completion, and doesn't have any integration with a build system or debugger. I have various debugger user interfaces — I like [seergdb](https://github.com/epasveer/seer) — but I do have it convenient to have a debugger integrated into my editor, rather than having to switch between two separate applications. Similarly, it's convenient to have a terminal integrated with the development environment, although it doesn't need to be. GEdit, plus seergdb, plus a terminal, plus some sort of a git browser, would work for me.
+
+#### New editors
+
+People online have suggested I try two new editors: [Zed](https://zed.dev/) and Gram: these are essentially the same editor, in fact. Zed proudly announces itself as
+
+> a minimal code editor crafted for speed and collaboration with humans and AI
+
+The Zed project seems to want to monetise their work by selling you AI tokens. Which LLM is behind their AI I don't know. Open Source development needs to be funded somehow; funding it through a tax on people who use AI is as good a way as any.
+
+Dear reader, I do **not want** to collaborate with AI; I don't want any of that shit in my working environment. So that immediately got my back up. It also doesn't have a Debian installer. But I was able to build it from source, and have been using it consistently over the last couple of days, and it's very pleasant. There's a built in debugger, but I cannot get it to work. Beyond that, my build crashes occasionally — maybe once every two or three hours; but it doesn't seem to lose anything when it crashes, so this is not obnoxious. If I ignore the 'AI' features, the lack of a working debugger is the only mark against it.
+
+[Gram](https://gram.liten.app/) is said to be a fork of Zed with the AI features removed. It has a proper Debian installation repository, which is a significant step up over Zed. Unfortunately, it won't run on my desktop machine, due to [a problem with the video card](https://codeberg.org/GramEditor/gram/issues/256). On my laptop, it runs fine, and seems generally usable — although, again, I can't get the debugger to work.
+
+#### Conclusion for now
+
+The conclusion for now is that I don't have a conclusion for now. Any of Gnome Builder, Zed and Gram are sort of good enough. Zed crashes, which is not desirable; Gram only launches on my laptop, but I mostly do serious development on my desktop; I can't yet work out how to launch the debugger on any of them. But none are annoying, none get in my way. I'll keep on evaluating.
 
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