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Why Don't We Have a General-Purpose Tree Editor? (2014)

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Re: Why Don't We Have a General-Purpose Tree Editor? (2014)

#21

Post by Filligree »

throwanem wrote: post #20
stupidcar wrote: post #12

We do: http://strlen.com/treesheets/

I should take a look at that, in case there are features there that org-mode doesn't already have and are worth stealing. More seriously, that looks like at least a sizable subset of org-mode's capabilities, implemented in a way that doesn't require clearing the hurdle that getting comfortable with Emacs tends to be. How is it on the import/export/interop side?

Never mind Emacs, Emacs is easy.

Org-mode itself seems like a tool where you have to read fifty pages of documentation to make good use of it. Maybe I'm exaggerating, but I've tried it a couple of times, and it never seems to be worth the complexity penalty vs. using a plain text file.

Re: Why Don't We Have a General-Purpose Tree Editor? (2014)

#22

Post by tambourine_man »

throwanem wrote: post #10
m1el wrote: post #3

Emacs has ParEdit minor mode which is a general-purpose tree editor. https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ParEdit edit: paredit demos: Productive Emacs: Paredit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1WBsI3gdDE Emacs Rocks! Episode 14: Paredit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6h5dFyyUX0

Maybe link to the Emacs Rocks demo in future - just a thought. I share it because I've known about paredit for years and just kind of gone ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and not bothered - but seeing that demo has sold me on the idea in a super big way, to the extent where it's going to impair my productivity today, or would if we weren't in a post-crunch breather. By comparison, the Emacs Wiki article is a poor introduction, because int…

You mean this?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=D6h5dFyyUX0

Re: Why Don't We Have a General-Purpose Tree Editor? (2014)

#23

Post by Philipp__ »

This certainly is good question. But, the fact that we don't have one yet maybe tells us that we haven't defined what it should be and what kind of problem it should solve.

I mean, I like the idea a lot! Used MindNode, but I found it very bound to specific type of problems. It is visualization tool. And Emacs is just too much. I use it from time to time, but I would like nice native general purpose text editor with Tree capability and Markdown support.

Re: Why Don't We Have a General-Purpose Tree Editor? (2014)

#25

Post by l0ner »

What comes to my mind is the Eclipse Modeling Framework. It's not exactly light-weight, but it always worked pretty well for my use cases. Throw a model at it (XML schema, annotated Java, ...) and it generates a Java implementation including a tree-based editor; certainly good enough for prototyping purposes.

Re: Why Don't We Have a General-Purpose Tree Editor? (2014)

#27

Post by al2o3cr »

FWIW, comparing my experiences with several different "graphical equation editors" (fundamentally a flavor of tree-editor) versus editing LaTeX code directly, the tree editor loses every time. Yes, the tree editor is capable of providing an amazingly efficient interface for modifying parts of an existing expression - but when you start restructuring the whole expression things get messy fast. The plain code method is a bit rougher to read / enter in simple cases, but since it's just text in a text editor it doesn't have the same complexity escalation when doing unusual reorganizations.

Re: Why Don't We Have a General-Purpose Tree Editor? (2014)

#28

Post by halotrope »

janci wrote: post #19

Somewhat related: I was overwhelmed by complexity of web CMS solutions. I needed something very very simple, that gets the task done (user-editable webpage content). I represent the web by a tree, every node has metadata (id, type, title) and data. Nodes can be persisted (ie. as json text files, or in database table) and browsed (parent to children and back). Admin UI is very simple: in the left pane there is the tre…

I had to work with Pimcore CMS recently (https://www.pimcore.org/en) and was pleasantly surprised. It works like you describe, the data is organised very developer friendly (classes and collections of data a tree structure for organisation). I am not sure how regular people would get along with this but knowing only bloated, slow and clumsy wordpress in that space it was surprisingly efficient.

Re: Why Don't We Have a General-Purpose Tree Editor? (2014)

#29

Post by m1el »

jamesrcole wrote: post #16
m1el wrote: post #3

Emacs has ParEdit minor mode which is a general-purpose tree editor. https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ParEdit edit: paredit demos: Productive Emacs: Paredit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1WBsI3gdDE Emacs Rocks! Episode 14: Paredit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6h5dFyyUX0

How good is it? I've never used it and I'm genuinely curious.

It depends on your requirements. ParEdit limits you to only perform AST transformations, which could be very good if you edit s-expressions or explicitly tree-like structures.

If I was working on lisp-like languages, I would definitely use it. But ParEdit didn't stick to me, even after a few attempts. I didn't like the key bindings, and I think that the interface is too complex for me.

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