51–60 of 154 posts
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.
In my classification of editors: 1. Orthodox. Mostly focused on looks and integrations. 2. Modal, Vim improvement. Focus on keeping basic Vim keybindings with minor improvements. 3. Modal, rethinking Vim approach. Ki falls into the third category which I constantly monitor.
4. All of the above. Which is Emacs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't really spent time thinking about it, because from reading their issue tracker, I very much doubt neovim would consider something like that. Partially because of how much of it is already vim specific and it would be very difficult to abstract that away, but mostly because of ideology. You can already to a lot in Neovim with plugins, including recreating Helix, Ki, whatever. But the problem is that the vim st…
I'm not sure how that's not "recreating everything". What's still shared if you replace the whole state machine (handling file management, etc) and also replace the whole input handling system? A terminal emulator and a copy of Lua?
By "recreating everything" I was also referring to the ecosystem around the editor
I feel so illiterate when it comes to AST editing sometimes. I understand what an AST is from a computer science perspective. But I've never worked on a huge software refactor before that required direct AST textobject editing. Maybe an indication of my skill level... The extent of my usage is having nice textobjects to easily interact with arglists and functions which aren't native to (neo)vim. Very cute and nice to…
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 least for small-scale cases) and reason about it. TypeScript examples:
# convert guard clauses to optional chaining
ast-grep -pattern '$A && $A.$B' --rewrite '$A?.$B' -lang ts
# convert self-assignment to nullish coalescing assignment
ast-grep -pattern '$X = $X ?? $Y' --rewrite '$X ??= $Y' -l ts
# convert arrow functions to function declarations (need separate patterns for async & for return-type-annotated though)
ast-grep -pattern 'const $NAME = ($$$PARAMS) => { $$$BODY }' --rewrite 'function $NAME($$$PARAMS) { $$$BODY }' -l ts
# convert indexOf checks to .includes()
ast-grep -pattern '$A.indexOf($B) !== -1' --rewrite '$A.includes($B)' -l ts
Sadly coding agents are still pretty bad at writing ast-grep patterns probably due to sparse training data. Hopefully that improves. The tool itself is solid!
I can't wait to try it. Love that it's keyboard layout agnostic. A lot of other good sounding ideas in the docs. Especially inspiration from Emacs as everything being an editable buffer. There's always some massive tradeoffs between editors though. Guess I'll have to see.
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.
Yes, Java IDEs have had these since sometime in the 2000s.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I was a Neovim macro user until I figured out how insane that was compared to multi-cursor after using Helix. Multi-cursor was the first plugin I installed when I moved from VSCode to Vim because I was used to hitting Ctrl+d to select all words and then replacing. Does Helix do something different? 1) First I reach for for visual block selection if everything is neatly aligned. 2) Next choice is %s/search/replace(/…
Sorry for derailing a bit, the search and replace using a query make sense for purly textual (non-syntactic) editing, but if you want to apply consistent syntactic modifications across multiple locations in the same file, you will need both multi-cursor and syntax node selection/navigation/modification. It's hard to explain unless you actually try Ki, because it is a paradigm shift
I'll give you that using the AST to select the references is an interesting addition to multi-cursor, but I still don't see how they would be useful compared to my current workflow.