Getting Edwin to open Scheme file correctly with C-x C-f

Question

I am learning SICP. I'm using Edwin 3.116 that installed with MIT-Scheme on my Windows 7 (32-bit) / AMD (64-bit) machine.

For the life of me I have not been able to discover why Edwin is unable to open and read a file correctly:

• When I open an existing .scm file (with my code in it) Edwin just opens a blank buffer with my file name.
• If I then save it, my code gets over-written with blankness. So clearly Edwin is not at pains to write.

Apart from not being able to find any answers, I have had no success with the following:

• C-x C-f followed by full path D:\my-schemes\filename.scm (while the default directory was at C:.....)
• M-x cd followed by d:\my-schemes followed by C-x C-f filename.scm
• Quit, restart MIT-Scheme and re-try above commands
• Uninstall-reinstall MIT-Scheme and re-try above commands

Is there something I have not done - like specify some parameter in some configuration file? (The Installation guide does not require any special config. for Windows, other than to follow the installer.)

I'm getting by with copy-pasting code from file-to-buffer and writing from buffer-to-file for now, but my scheming could be so much better if I could get Edwin to read too.

Answer 1

vutha's suggestion of installing in a directory without spaces didn't work for me because I needed to access files inside a folder with spaces in the name. But it pointed me in the right direction. There is a bug in versions 9.1 and 9.2 that completely brakes Edwin in Windows.

The only thing that worked was to uninstall the latest version (there is a uninst.exe file in the installation folder) and then install version 9.0.

Answer 2

just in case you might not yet found a solution. I encountered the same problem and just found one that worked for me so I'm thinking sharing my solution. If you installed with the default setting, everything is installed in 'Program Files/...'. The problem with this seems to be that the directory name contains space. When I tried saving in other directory without space, and I could write to a file. I can open the file with a normal text editor, but when I open with Edwin all I saw was a blank page. I tried installing an older version (MIT GNU scheme 9.0) and it worked as mentioned in this bug report: http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?35250