We're close two working weeks into Google's Summer of Code, and the student I'm mentoring, Brian Gruber, is making good progress in his project to add MusicXML support to Gsharp – sufficiently good to blog about it, in fact.

Discussing things with Brian, and fixing some of the embarrassing bugs in gsharp that he found, has also encouraged me to tidy up a little some of my accumulated divergences from the Gsharp CVS and commit them; in particular, the lack of line- and page-based motion commands was a significant annoyance last time I edited a score in Gsharp, so I spent an evening working out a sufficiently good implementation, and now C-a, C-e, C-x [ and C-x ] work as an emacs user might expect. (It's ever so slightly trickier than it might seem, because there's no information in the gsharp buffer recording layout information per se; the gsharp buffer contains a complicated data structure representing each individual musical (or graphical) object, but the page and line layout is computed separately – so motion by layout element needs additional computation).

Other things coming soon to a CVS repository near common-lisp.net, to whom thanks go for their hosting: correct placement of whole-bar rests (in the middle of a bar, if they are the only element in their layer in that bar); a hacky printing facility; maybe even a reworking of the currently-useless panes on the right-hand side of a gsharp window...