Re: Extension Language for a Text Editor

* Charles Hixson <[e-mail]> [Oct, 10 2003 20:30]:
[stuff about regexen]
> 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?
Hm, yeah, this is probably not what I'm looking for.  It's a nice idea
perhaps, but it can easily become something for children to play with,
rather than for a programmer to utilize.
> 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.)
Hehe, probably ;-).  I wonder how many 'user-friendly' things get
dropped since they prove not to be what they set out to be.  Look at
Windows.  They're adding and removing things all the time.  Does anyone
remember the '<--- Click Here To Start' thing that scrolled across the
taskbar when you started it up?  Man, was that stupid or what?  You have
a button that says 'Start' and then you get an arrow that tells you that
if you click it, you 'Start'.  My mom would have gotten that.
> 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.)
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.  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).  It's just not powerful
enough.  Vim _is_ powerful enough, but it still feels wrong somehow.
Anyway,
	nikolai

--
::: 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 :::
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