The language of Vim

Re:The language of Vim by swift on Thursday March 28, 2013 @12:36PM (#5455874)

The idea that really excites me is 'STRUCTURE editor as a language' - that is, the same sort of grammar as Vim, but manipulating semantically meaningful structures like expressions or functions instead of text. I'd love to see an editor reenvisioned completely around that concept, with "normal" text editing only as a fallback.

(Of course, Vim does have text objects, which are fantastic - one of the chief reasons I use Vim. But they have limitations; I think you can go a lot further.)

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Re:The language of Vim by gcr on Thursday March 28, 2013 @11:12PM (#5459051)

Take a look at the E editor, it marries Vim's exceedingly efficient editing language with semantically meaningful text objects. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_Text_Editor (The website seems to be down, which is a shame)

Or if you have days to burn, emacs+paredit+evil can russtle quite a few jimmies if you take the time to define some custom keybindings for it.

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Re:The language of Vim by pekk on Thursday March 28, 2013 @01:53PM (#5456463)

The significant development there is to efficiently work with ASTs for the different languages. Maybe the only reason that kind of implementation isn't shared is because it is typically rolled into commercial IDEs rather than being opened up and exposed in a way that is accessible to existing editors.

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Re:The language of Vim by aerique on Thursday March 28, 2013 @02:04PM (#5456535)

Ah, nevermind. I totally misread your comment. Not deleting my comment for the link to the Paredit video.

Paredit would be a step in that direction: http://emacsrocks.com/e14.html

I also recall editors of old having that functionality (Zmacs?).

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Re:The language of Vim by swift on Friday March 29, 2013 @02:10AM (#5459497)

Paredit is super great, indeed. Lisp is perfect for this sort of thing.

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Re:The language of Vim by stcredzero on Thursday March 28, 2013 @02:35PM (#5456762)

I think that's genius! Languages have parallel syntax structures in common, more often than anything else!

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Re:The language of Vim by michaell2 on Thursday March 28, 2013 @02:11PM (#5456588)

so have I got a deal for you :) Anyway, my recently published "nestgrid" framework is precisely that (among other possible uses). A mix of xml editor, spreadsheet, direct manipulation of objects ui, and all around cool thing; flash demo included. See http://nestgrid.wordpress.com/nestgrid-paper/

EDIT: fixed url as per @nocman's advice.

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Re:The language of Vim by nocman on Thursday March 28, 2013 @02:49PM (#5456863)

You muffed the URL -- here's the one that works

http://nestgrid.wordpress.com/nestgrid-paper/

:-D

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Re:The language of Vim by swift on Thursday March 28, 2013 @08:06PM (#5458464)

This looks really interesting! I look forward to reading through it tonight.

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