Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

pcmonk.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 222 posts

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

#71

Post by TeMPOraL »

kovek wrote: post #69
TeMPOraL wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty good, it almost make you feel you're working on trees and not text. Takes a few moments to get used to. I recommend what I did: take a bunch of Lisp code, strip it out of parenthesis (M-x replace-string, replace ( and ) with empty strings), and then use Paredit commands to restore the original tree structure. I spent less than an hour simply doing this exercise again and again, and it was enough to become a pr…

Good exercise. Thank you! Also, there are alternatives. What do you think about them?

Don't know of any (could you name them?), so I don't have any opinion.

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

#73

Post by therealmarv »

dTal wrote: post #49
therealmarv wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For XML you may want to take a closer look at XML Marker 1.1 (it's old, freeware and Windows but still better than many other tools) and maybe Eclipse.

I think that sums it up. We really can't top crufty old Windows freeware? There is a gaping hole in the market.

The last time I worked on complex XML I even used XML Marker with WINE... it works there. If you want the Mercedes of XML editors you should take a look at Oxygen XML editor (this is not free but runs on more platforms than Windows).

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

#74

Post by neonnoodle »

See to me the problem is the notion of tree structure itself. Forgive me because I don't know the correct mathematical way to talk about this: a tree is a particular type of network in which nodes can have only one direct parent and thus only share siblings with the descendants of that single parent. What we are really lacking is a good network editor, which would encompass not only trees but also more complex rhizomatic network structures.

I think Ted Nelson's ZigZag structure is the closest anyone has come as yet, but manipulating those is NOT user friendly (to say the least). Visualization of multidimensional networks is difficult on many levels, particularly UI. At a certain point you probably come up against hard cognitive limits of human thought.

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

#75

Post by lebski88 »

This is a part of what we're working on at atomist - https://www.atomist.com/

We're imagining the idea that your whole development flow is expressible in terms of trees and expressions that we can use to navigate those trees. Say for example a webhook pushes a commit event. We can navigate from that commit, into the chat channel associated with it. Find the repo that contains it. Associate it with the build and link the two together in chat or, most relevant to this article, navigate into the code itself and perform an action such as changing the code or opening a PR with a suggested edit and comment.

The interesting thing is that it's trees the whole way down. We can use the same expression to reach across all all kinds of events or to pick out individual tokens or structures inside the code.

There's lots of information on our blog: https://the-composition.com/

We've open sourced a lot of our core work at: https://github.com/atomist and are also interested in talking to teams about joining out alpha (see atomist.com)

It's a really interesting problem to be working on.

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

#77

Post by bitexploder »

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

Don't forget org mode or mind mapping software. Both are quite able with hierarchical data.

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

#78

Post by zoren »

audunw wrote: post #50

I've been thinking about this constantly for the last 2-3 years. I'm working on something which might lead to this. What I've concluded, is that we don't have a good representation for a general purpose tree editor to work on. Roughly speaking, S-expressions are just a bit too simple, and XML is way too complicated. General purpose plain text editors work so well because we've agreed on a common representation (more…

Isn't it only the types of the AST-nodes rather than semantics you need a common representation for?
Post reply on HN