partially editable files

[Edward Peschko]

All,

I was thinking about my particular application - creating training examples for a NN from human feedback - and think that I could whip something up if vim had the ability to make only parts of its file editable, and the rest boilerplate.

Think of this simple form:

Dear <<<person>>>>

We received your order for <<<name>>>, price <<<price>>>, quantity <<<quantity>>>, total <<<total>>>

If vim could make it so that only the bracketed portions (<<<person>>>,<<name>>, etc) were editable - and blank before being entered - and the keybindings skipped non-editable portions of the file, then more than half of the job of creating a form-based app would be done. 

Ideally, it would be great if each bracket would have an associated callback in perl, python, or vimscript that did getting and setting, but a keybinding could handle that. 

So is this possible or even feasible? I'm thinking about the alternative - namely, making this all vim-macro-driven and force the edits onto the user but that is highly suboptimal because they could easily misedit parts of the form or otherwise screw up the data entry. 

And the idea of making a forms application from scratch when something like vim already exists - and has such powerful extensions that I could use and therefore would have to reimplement poorly to get even remotely the same look and feel - just fills me with dread.

Thanks much,

Ed