Extension Language for a Text Editor

[Nikolai Weibull]

Here is the first problem that we found:

def somemethod(something)
return Array.new() unless @var.class == Array
end

Aw great. Oh well, I guess I'll have to start debugging from the start
again. Thanks for finding this.

The use of the .class method confuses the syntax. If you use the
deprecated type() method, this problem goes away.

OK. Yeah, you're probably correct. I'll have to look at how to solve
this.

If I notice anything else I'll be sure to provide feedback. If I can get
to the point where a gg=G can be relied on as I used to rely on Emacs, I'll
be extremely happy indeed.

I hope it will too ;-). It does for the 1.6.8 version of tk.rb anyway.
That's a 3500 line file or similar and it indents it flawlessly and in
under 10 seconds on my computer,
nikolai

 

[Joerg Fischer]

That's right. However nedit's macro language is very easy to learn
and does exactly what you need 99% of the time inside a text
editor. (Most folks like to get their job done quickly rather than
to program their editor.)

Yes. And let me tell you, it's crap. Sorry, I don't want to heat up
the discussion here, but in my eyes, NEdit just isn't very good. It's
an attempt to bring Windows like editors to Unix.

This is wrong in any way. It is a GUI editor following the Unix
philosophy of doing one job (text editing) very well. Other task are
transfered to other specialized programs.
Windows programs tend to duplicate functionality. There are
virtually no editors on Windows w/o built-in file manager, ftp
client, diff tools, cvs tools (if it is an expensive one) and so on.

The top of this is emacs - add everything into a single application
and claim it would be a powerful *text editor*. IMO it isn't even a
good one ;-).

It has a lot of weird design decisions that I just don't like
(and neither do many of the people I've spoken to about it at
the Computer Technics (whatever that's really called in English)
Department at Uni).

Oh, you just don't like it and that is why it is not good. I see.

It's just not powerful enough. Vim _is_ powerful enough, but it
still feels wrong somehow.

Interesting. Nedit has no hex editor and has no built-in folding.
It also requires an X server, where vim is a console editor. What
else do you believe you can do with vim but not with nedit?

Cheers,
Jörg

fup2 comp.editors

 

[Gavin Sinclair]

Thank you. I see matchit is working correctly as well--I was relying on
Ned Konz's version to get this.

LOL. I included it, and I *still* can't get it to work. Mind you,
laziness has greatly overtaken impatience and hubris and even been
taken out of context now.

Cheers,
Gavin

 

[Brett Williams]

LOL. I included it, and I *still* can't get it to work. Mind you,
laziness has greatly overtaken impatience and hubris and even been
taken out of context now.

Hmmm... perhaps I just am not encountering whatever situation causes you
problems. What exactly doesn't work?

 

[Mark Hurvitz]

Nisus Writer for Classic (Mac OS 9) still supports the "graphic
editor" mentioned here. It's also available in our free version for
Classic (Nisus Writer 4.1.6), though version 6.5 has more graphic
"bubbles" to represent all of what can be typed in than does 4.1.6.

Nisus Writer Express (form Mac OS X) also uses a graphic editor (gui)
for its Find/Replace.

Check it out at:

<http://www.nisus.com>

`//rite On!
,\\ark Hurvitz
Vice President for Communications
Nisus Software Inc.
<http://www.nisus.com>

...

Well, to be blunt, whatever you come up with won't be as popular or
useful as the existing regular expressions, just because they'll be a
nonstandard replacement of something already very common. PCRE
regexps are extremely flexible and well-known.

As useful? Please, my dear sir, there has to be something better than
the way we describe regular expressions now. At least for searching
text. The syntax we have today for regular expressions is basically the
same, only extended, as that that Ken Thompson uses in his 1968 paper on
it. Or that of _real_ regular expressions long before it. And
remember, real regular expressions only have * (Kleene star) and no +.
There has to be a simpler syntax that can be useful for interactive text
search-and-replaces. Look at Vim, Emacs, and Perl (and thus,
basically, Ruby)'s syntax. They are all extensions of this, adding new
short cryptic ways of saying things that you often don't need, and if
you did you wouldn't want to do it that way anyway. The real example of
how it has gotten out of hand is the overuse of backslash (\). It is
everywhere. having to move my hand to the upper right corner of my
keyboard all the time is a real pain.
Of course we'll have to see if I'm actually able to come up with
anything better. It's probably not going to be as easy as I'd like to
suggest here. However, look at the Perl 6 Apocalypse 5[1] to see one way
of moving away from cryptic (?:...) metasyntaxes.

I've seen one (1) way of improving regexp's. It involved using graphic
representations while creating them. After expression creation, it was
rendered into text (and if you knew what you wanted, you could just type
it in). I haven't seen any actual language improvements that weren't in
some way isomorphic. (I.e., you can use pretty graphics for each of the
inserted characters, and you might do something to make typing the
escape character easier, but improving the semantics ... I haven't seen
any better options. And improving the syntax... possibly if you switch
to unicode...but then how do you enter it?

Nah OK. You've got a point. But, as with most free software, this
one's for me ;-). If anyone wants to tag along later on, fine. But I

So you won't be interested in the graphic editor. I've got a vague idea
of how much additional work that would be. It was in a commercial
product on the Mac, but I don't think it's being made any more. (Either
Nisus or Qued/M ... probably Qued/M, but if it's Nisus, I seem to
remember that the feature went away in a later version... too complex
for many of their potential customers, perhaps.)

won't care if no one is interested, Emacs and Vim are fine editors.
Even notepad has its uses. It can, for example, tell you if a file is
smaller or greater than 65535 bytes very easily ;-).
I have, perhaps, failed to describe the real winning here. (Alas, I
realize I forgot to mention it.) As you perhaps know, Vim, and most
other UNIX software, operate on a line-by-line basis. This restriction...

--
::: name: Nikolai Weibull :: aliases: pcp / lone-star / aka :::
::: born: Chicago, IL USA :: loc atm: Gothenburg, Sweden :::
::: page: www.pcppopper.org :: fun atm: gf,lps,ruby,lisp,war3 :::
main(){printf(&linux["\021%six\012\0"],(linux)["have"]+"fun"-97);}

Not to discourage you, but have you looked at NEdit? It doesn't have a
full scripting language, but it has some nice pattern recognition
mechanisms. And it's GPL. (OTOH, I've never gotten their source to
compile...they don't use a standard make system, but something of their
own creation that seems to me to have problems.)