Text Editors easy to hack/fork ?

dejy · 2014-10-29 18:54:56

I do some translations as a kind of hobby activity and have a good amount of experience with linguistic tools, and lately I have realized how horrible my work flow is in the former, and how pretty much entirely un-applied the later are in real time.
The point is rather there are a lot of tools, that I would take advantage of, if I could fit them into the normal work flow that goes into a text-editor,(having a set of key activated macros, or processes that run by default), without consuming significant interactive or coding time (i.e. python NLTK, numpy, some graphs etc, also localized memory for translation pairs and the like), which would ideally happen in the background. My knowledge of C is pretty limited, but it would be something I could work on slowly over a long period of time.

Looking for some advice on what text editors people have found to be most friendly towards extensibility and modification, that I should take a look at. Thanks.

ewaller · 2014-10-29 19:03:05

Editor wars aside, emacs is designed specifically for that.

dejy · 2014-10-29 19:27:59

ewaller wrote:

Editor wars aside, emacs is designed specifically for that.

Am I going to be stuck learning Lisp? =O

ewaller · 2014-10-29 19:45:40

dejy wrote:

Am I going to be stuck learning Lisp? =O

Oh, it is not that bad. I admit, I am not a Lisp programmer. I can play in it and mostly use it to customize settings and pull in stuff that have been already done by others
For example, here is a site that hosts more than 2000 modules that are ready to go. Some of those provide all the bindings you need to use bash, Python, etc... instead of Lisp.

Awebb · 2014-10-29 19:54:27

When I read the title, my mind automatically gravitated towards vim or emacs. It's not just because they are almost powerful enough to replace most other tools in most text driven workflows, but there seems to be an extension for everything and they are both thoroughly documented.

dejy · 2014-10-29 20:00:35

Awebb wrote:

When I read the title, my mind automatically gravitated towards vim or emacs. It's not just because they are almost powerful enough to replace most other tools in most text driven workflows, but there seems to be an extension for everything and they are both thoroughly documented.

I would really rather write my own extensions, my requirements are pretty specific - and, not to say that people don't think and/or code similar tools, but sometimes what they produce is just convoluted enough that it takes just about as much time to write your own tool, as to figure out how to do what you want with theirs.

I am going to install emacs and play around with it - though I really doubt I can do some of the finer-grained things I would want without having to learn Lisp.

I am also considering trying Atom (I might save time from learning an extra language, but some hard-coded magic might hurt a lot more in the long run), if anyone has an had experience with either of those, especially as to scripting and extensibility I'd be interested to hear.

Last edited by dejy (2014-10-29 20:19:27)

chickenPie4tea · 2014-11-22 10:56:58

I would look at, Lime, or Sublime
You can take a look at the plugins already written for them (many) and learn from them.

Trilby · 2014-11-22 12:27:42

While I second much of the above that vim is very extensible (so is that other editor, but I just can't force myself to actually admit it), if you are more familiar with python you may want to check out Editra.

Editra doesn't really fit my personal style, but I've been impressed with how well it is made. It is written completely in python, and has *many* scripting capabilities exposed. You can write addons/plugins/whatever in python.

I have to disagree with the suggestion of Sublime. It is under a proprietary license which I can't even find the text of to check, but I highly doubt modifications to the source would be legal. In fact many archers who even use Sublime are currently using it in violation of the license.

EDIT: I see sublime has a plugin API allowing plugins written in python. So this would not require potentially-illegal modifications, but just the same if you are going to use sublime for any continued use, you'd need to be sure to buy a license.

Last edited by Trilby (2014-11-22 12:31:47)

augustob · 2014-12-08 04:17:14

dejy wrote:

I am also considering trying Atom (I might save time from learning an extra language, but some hard-coded magic might hurt a lot more in the long run), if anyone has an had experience with either of those, especially as to scripting and extensibility I'd be interested to hear.

As a Sublime Text user who's sick of the poor rate of development/development model, I've been following Atom pretty closely, and it's moving FAST. They managed to whip up a community overnight, and even though it's based on all sorts of magical web things (which made me VERY reluctant to try it out) it actually runs well enough to be usable now. The built-in package management of Atom is pretty amazing, and beats that of Sublime (which is a user extension) hands down.

If you're looking for something smaller, there's a suckless version of vim called vis [1]: it's not ready for prime time, but I had some fun implementing things like a barebones autocomplete. Make sure to read the dev's posts on the suckless mailing list if you want to play around with this.

[1] http://www.brain-dump.org/blog/entry/14 … ext_editor

dejy · 2014-12-20 21:19:05

augustob wrote:

dejy wrote:
I am also considering trying Atom (I might save time from learning an extra language, but some hard-coded magic might hurt a lot more in the long run), if anyone has an had experience with either of those, especially as to scripting and extensibility I'd be interested to hear.
As a Sublime Text user who's sick of the poor rate of development/development model, I've been following Atom pretty closely, and it's moving FAST. They managed to whip up a community overnight, and even though it's based on all sorts of magical web things (which made me VERY reluctant to try it out) it actually runs well enough to be usable now. The built-in package management of Atom is pretty amazing, and beats that of Sublime (which is a user extension) hands down.
If you're looking for something smaller, there's a suckless version of vim called vis [1]: it's not ready for prime time, but I had some fun implementing things like a barebones autocomplete. Make sure to read the dev's posts on the suckless mailing list if you want to play around with this.
[1] http://www.brain-dump.org/blog/entry/14 … ext_editor

I really thought about Atom, and spent a day messing around with it and the Adobe one (Brackets). But ultimately it's a text editor that lags! And no matter how cool the features or the ability to write add-ons just can't settle for that, and switching to a decisively inferior product on account of "it will get faster later" didn't seem like a valid excuse; plus it's coffeescript, - which if you're a front-end dev you might already be fluent in, or have been aching to learn. I am not a developer and for me javascript even without any other frameworks is already a magical language - and coffeescript is just another added layer magic on top of it (I do understand how if you worked with javascript all day someone would like the terser syntax and neater looking files) - but it just wasn't for me.

The problem I've found is that most editors just don't presume your additions need something like keypress-input and buffer-access - i.e. if you're maintaining a second buffer say with an xml representation of what's on the screen with additional meta-data, you not only need to update in real-time on keypress, but also hook into copy, paste, undo, replace commands, to make sure the buffers do not diverge, which most text-editors don't give easy access to. I've messed around (it's relatively easy to implement some of this in a small text-editor, but it comes at the cost of a lot of other functionality) but nano (which is an awful text editor) is already 1.6mgb! Anyways I could be completely wrong and there might be a well-featured text-editor with excellent api access to low-level functionality, I just haven't found it.

Arch Linux

#1 2014-10-29 18:54:56

Text Editors easy to hack/fork ?

#2 2014-10-29 19:03:05

Re: Text Editors easy to hack/fork ?

#3 2014-10-29 19:27:59

Re: Text Editors easy to hack/fork ?

#4 2014-10-29 19:45:40

Re: Text Editors easy to hack/fork ?

#5 2014-10-29 19:54:27

Re: Text Editors easy to hack/fork ?

#6 2014-10-29 20:00:35

Re: Text Editors easy to hack/fork ?

#7 2014-11-22 10:56:58

Re: Text Editors easy to hack/fork ?

#8 2014-11-22 12:27:42

Re: Text Editors easy to hack/fork ?

#9 2014-12-08 04:17:14

Re: Text Editors easy to hack/fork ?

#10 2014-12-20 21:19:05

Re: Text Editors easy to hack/fork ?

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