91–100 of 154 posts
How does this work in the many cases where in-progress edits result in an unparseable structure?
Ex: https://github.com/microsoft/tolerant-php-parser/blob/main/d...
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.
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…
No, I'm not claiming to have read all one hundred pages already. However, from what I have read I'd love to see a functional demo.
¹ https://simh.trailing-edge.com/
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…
Pantograph[0] seems to be a more recent attempt to implement the same idea. It is still not a general editor but generalizing it to ranges of tree selections looks promising [0]: https://pantographeditor.github.io/Pantograph/
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…
> 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.
The challenge is one of finding an intuitive user interface, not whether it's possible at all. One issue is that infix notation is unnatural for entering trees (prefix is more natural).
As always emacs has it already https://github.com/mickeynp/combobulate
It makes editing supported languages almost as pleasant as editing Lisp.
With how well the integration already work in existing editors, I'm curious how the UX can be improved further by an editor made specifically with AST editing in mind.
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.
Mathematica is the earliest thing I am aware of with this feature where it was Alt+. to expand selection in their notebook interface starting in the early 90s. But the thing I miss most that I still can't shake the muscle memory of after almost a decade of not using much Mathematica, is that single/double/triple/n-click scaled this way as well. So double-click selected a whole word (as in all editors), triple-click s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it not? Scripting language? Check! Custom commands? Check! Windows management? Check! Build tools integration and error-based navigation? Check! File manager? Check!
Operating system? Check or not? :D