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Ki Editor - an editor that operates on the AST

ki-editor.org

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Re: Ki Editor - an editor that operates on the AST

#111

Post by socalgal2 »

radford-neal wrote: post #96
Normal_gaussian wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The challenge is getting this to be a useable way of entering programs. Well exactly. When the path between Program A and Program B can only be valid programs, you are going to end up with either a much longer, less intuitive path, or deleting everything and starting again. It can also be quite possible to invent structures which are valid but have no valid path to creating them.

Well, I think most common transformations work reasonably well. One usually doesn't want to do things completely contrary to the AST, such as convert "while a And it's certainly possible to create any valid AST in the editor I describe. The set of valid trees is extended to those with "holes" in places, which one fills in when entering a program, and it's always possible to do this. The challenge is one of finding an…

no syntax error editing seems like https://scratch.mit.edu/

Re: Ki Editor - an editor that operates on the AST

#112

Post by socalgal2 »

WickyNilliams wrote: post #75
aragonite wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess it's hard for me to edit things that I don't see right in front of me or aren't super simple changes (like name changes). Or at least, basic things I can reason about (such as finding by regex then deleting by textobject or something). This is actually what's nice about tools like ast-grep. The pattern language reads almost like the code itself so you can see the transformation right in front of you (at lea…

Came here to recommend ast-grep too! If your editor of choice supports an extension (vscode does for example) it's a very easy on-ramp for a better search/replace than regex offers. It's syntax-aware so you don't need care about whitespace, indentation etc. Very easy to dip your toes in where a regex would get complex fast, or require multiple passes. I converted a codebase from commonjs to esm trivially with a few c…

I don't know which editors support this but there's also, for lack of a better word, context aware grep. For example, search and replace foo with bar but only inside strings, or only inside comments, or only variables, or only methods, not class names (maybe ast-grep does this).

Re: Ki Editor - an editor that operates on the AST

#113

Post by hrmtst93837 »

worksonmine wrote: post #9
armchairhacker wrote: post #2

Vim-like (terminal and VSCode extension) that prioritizes syntax-based navigation. Comparison to Vim and Helix: https://ki-editor.org/docs/comparison#user-content-fn-1

That comparison table is strange and sometimes wrong. Neovim for example detects and updates external file changes by default. And the coherence of the keybindings in Ki is "Great" bit vim/helix: > As you can see, there's no single logical categorization for these keymaps, they are either lowercase-uppercase, normal-alt, left-right bracket, or outright unexplainable. Word, End, Back, Change Word and even Change Inner…

[flagged]

Re: Ki Editor - an editor that operates on the AST

#114

Post by jskdev »

radford-neal wrote: post #83

Many years ago, I created an editor operating on syntax trees that I think is more "hard-core" than this - that is, only tree-oriented operations are done. There is no parsing of text, since entering plain text, rather than a tree, is impossible. Hence, there can be no syntactically invalid programs. The challenge is getting this to be a useable way of entering programs. I think I made progress on this, but the feasi…

Wow! I stumbled onto your paper a while ago when I was looking into structural editing and thinking of a masters in CS, exploring editor interfaces / feedback loops.

(Maybe your paper is famous and it’s not wild that I read it, but it was wild to see after so many years)

I never took that path, spent time in tech industry confused why people didn’t seem interested in structural editing and better editing tools.

Out of curiosity, how do you think LLMs and genai affect the value of structural editors and similar tooling?

Part of me wants to stay disciplined— of course it’s valuable to work efficiently and work on the AST and with a repl. The other part of me gets paid to work on essentially a punch card system (building dev, ship to prod and see what happens)

Re: Ki Editor - an editor that operates on the AST

#115

Post by conartist6 »

radford-neal wrote: post #83

Many years ago, I created an editor operating on syntax trees that I think is more "hard-core" than this - that is, only tree-oriented operations are done. There is no parsing of text, since entering plain text, rather than a tree, is impossible. Hence, there can be no syntactically invalid programs. The challenge is getting this to be a useable way of entering programs. I think I made progress on this, but the feasi…

Now you're out of the realm of Ki, but what you're talking about is still being worked on in the modern era, by me! I'm building BABLR which is a modern follow-up to your idea, built on top of a powerful, generic system of parsers which has gaps/holes but no error recovery, so that it works with trees which may be incomplete but which must not be invalid.

The hard part is that we need to be able to talk about these structures. Even just here on this forum we need to be able to communicate precisely about them. I often use · as a typesetting symbol so that I can easily write and read expressions like 2 + · which you would read as "two plus gap". The · symbol is only for typesetting as I say thought because you it's not safe to assume that any one character is reserved for our use in every programming language. Instead we wrap the parts that aren't syntactic in quotes and we use as the symbol for a gap so that it looks more like this:

   "2 + "
The * there is a flag on the node, it means this node a leaf of the tree -- a token.

We can parse 2 + · into a proper tree now:

  
    left: 
    #: " "
    operator: 
    #: " "
    right:
And yes, BABLR can really parse this. If we've piqued your curiosity, our Discord server is currently the hub of our community and we'd love to see you. https://discord.gg/NfMNyYN6cX

Re: Ki Editor - an editor that operates on the AST

#116

Post by joquarky »

scriptsmith wrote: post #7

The "First-class syntactic selection" reminds me of my most used shortcut(s) in Jetbrains IDEs: the Expand / Shrink Selection. Ctrl + W Ctrl + Shift + W https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/working-with-source-code... It really changed my perspective on interacting with the 'text' of a file. VS Code, Zed, etc. have similar operations, but in my experience they expand and shrink too coarsely.

One problem is I got so used to Ctrl-W that I use it in other applications and usually wind up inadvertently closing the tab.

Re: Ki Editor - an editor that operates on the AST

#118

Post by antiframe »

skydhash wrote: post #90
School-Cotton wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even close.

How is it not? Scripting language? Check! Custom commands? Check! Windows management? Check! Build tools integration and error-based navigation? Check! File manager? Check!

I think the "Scripting language? Check!" is missing an important distinctions between Emacs and most other extensible editors. The proportion of the code editor features that are written in the configuration/extension language matters

Looking at the Emacs and NeoVim codebases in GitHub: Emacs is 74.6% ELisp or CommonLisp and NeoVim is 71.9% Lua or VimScript. Never mind, NeoVim is close!

But, can you at runtime modify the NeoVim core functions? Honest question because I've only used vim and VimScript was definately limited compared to elisp. If so, then I say NeoVim and Emacs are both highly-extensible editors.

Re: Ki Editor - an editor that operates on the AST

#119

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

I think the challenge with AST editing is discoverability. Like, I know what I want to select, I can see it there on the screen, but I don't know its name.

I've been dreaming of writing a plugin that surrounded the cursor in differently colored scopes. So instead of "next function" I'd be thinking "next blue" (blue being the color that functions are currently painted in).

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