Structured editors

[Mike Austin]

“Strict structured editors often make it difficult to perform edits that are easy to perform with plain text editors, which is one of the factors contributing to the lack of adoption of structured editing in some domains, such as source code editing.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_editor

It’s true. I haven’t met a structured editor that feels right. There is always some awkward delete or insert in the wrong place. I think it can be done. In Confluence, I know you can move the cursor before an image, for example, with a carat as tall as the image. You can then just press enter to add a new line. In other editor, this task is sometimes awkward to do.

Maybe it’s time I attempt to write my own ;)

https://wordplay.dev

This was announced as beta, and I think it’s interesting because it uses a form of functional reactive programming. Trying to write a program, though, I feel like I’m fighting with the editor.

[Mike Austin]

https://github.com/yairchu/awesome-structure-editors

[Raoul Duke]

it just has to be nuanced. "what we need is subtlety - AND LOTS OF IT". yes i desperately want a good flowing flexible fluid dwim ai structured editor. i so dx-h8 the status quo of walls of ascii text that might or might not mean what you think you thought it meant let alone whoever wrote the code originally. 

[Sébastien Pierre]

You should check out Andrew Blinn's work here https://twitter.com/disconcision and in particular Hazel https://hazel.org/ -- there's also the Visual Languages and Human Centric conf, which had this paper this year: https://conf.researchr.org/details/vlhcc-2023/vlhcc-2023-research-papers/8/Gradual-Structure-Editing-with-Obligations.

It's interesting when looking at how Hazel is implemented that it is a text editor with a visual underlay -- its primary format is text, but it seems to manage a tree structure at the same time.Still a lot to explore in that space!

On Thu, 2 Nov 2023 at 04:32, Raoul Duke <rao...@gmail.com> wrote:

it just has to be nuanced. "what we need is subtlety - AND LOTS OF IT". yes i desperately want a good flowing flexible fluid dwim ai structured editor. i so dx-h8 the status quo of walls of ascii text that might or might not mean what you think you thought it meant let alone whoever wrote the code originally. 

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[Mike Austin]

Oh, I Iike it (Hazel). Yeah, it's structured but it feels like a free-form editor. It's the best of both worlds. I wonder if I could add holes to my Kopi langauge.

Thanks for the links!