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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)

#61

Post by simias »

Filligree wrote: post #21
throwanem wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As somebody who only makes a pretty basic use of org-mode I disagree.

Without having to read anything you just have to remember to use * to mark sections and * * for subsections and so on. Then you use tab to expand/collapse the sections. That's rather intuitive, not more complicated than a plain text file and already you have better highlighting and additional functionality.

Then sometimes I wonder "hey, I'd like to have a link to this URL in this file" or "I'd like to export this to HTML or PDF so that I can send it to my friend who doesn't use org-mode without losing the formatting". And then you look in the manual and you (generally) find what you're looking for.

Sure if you want to be an org-mode wizard you'll have to learn quite a bit but I really don't see "the complexity penalty vs. using a plain text file". The complexity is only here if you want it.

Edit: also the array auto-formatting is a godsend. Doing it by hand in text files is tedious.

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

#62

Post by mrmondo »

tonetheman wrote: post #36

Little Outliner 2 is pretty good. http://littleoutliner.com/ Made by Dave @ scripting.com

Went to try it out but it requires signing into your twitter account and they get access to:

- Update your profile.

- Post Tweets for you.

That's not cool.

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

#64

Post by wdfx »

smarinov wrote: post #60
wdfx wrote: post #59

http://www.yworks.com/products/yed and GraphML ?

yed is the best tool for the job I've used so far, so I'm glad someone already mentioned it.

I have found it most handy for visualising data that I've dumped elsewhere in a simple format such as .tgf (generated dependency diagrams etc).

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

#65

Post by rini17 »

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…

While we might have some common idea what is text, we definitely not have common semantics! The resulting situation isn't so much different from trees.

And what do you mean by "s-expressions just too simple"? Isn't simplicity something to strive for?

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

#66

Post by jventura »

l0ner wrote: post #25

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.

I'm curious about your use cases, as I do not seem to find much information about model-driven development out there. Can you elaborate a little bit more about what you do with EMF?

I'm asking this on the perspective of someone who is about to teach model-driven software engineering for a semester but cannot find much pratical use for it..

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

#69

Post by kovek »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #48
jamesrcole wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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?

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

#70

Post by fiatpandas »

Architects and the like already work with a really great tree editor called Grasshopper. Easy to see cross sections through your tree as you are arranging components and relationships L->R or T->B, so there is potential to have very clear hierarchies depending on the style of the user.

Also, I've been impressed with a lot of the invention that has happened around Grasshopper's UX + UI. I've been really surprised to see the design community emerge with the best graph programming editor, as opposed to something much more developer focused.

It is of course not general purpose because you have to have Rhino to use it, but it can be used for general purpose programming since you can create custom components with .NET, ignoring most of the pre-built ones that are focused on parameterized geometry.

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