Comments on: Actually, this IS your father’s text editor

By: Thomas

Thomas — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 09:18:06 +0000

Hypertext coding? MozRepl provides live access to firefox javascript internals, but outside of, not inside the browser. (Inspired by the Read-Eval-Print-Loop of LISP, nowadays also provided by python and ruby) Now the creator of it has added an experimental module to replace the command line interface to mozrepl with a web server. This means you can access nearly all firefox internals via a web browser (be it firefox again or IE, …). From this it should not be too difficult to fill up templates that show off variables, arrays, functions as html in a very nice and maybe even useful way. But you would still lack a decent editor based on html-technologies.

By: Peter Crouch

Peter Crouch — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:46:17 +0000

Personally I prefer this plain and simple old school text editor: http://home.online.no/~westerma/WestEdit/

By: Patrick

Patrick — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 23:24:44 +0000

@Danielle: Nope, haven’t heard of Fortress before, but I’ll check it out. Based on your description, sounds a bit like Knuth’s literate programming.

By: Danielle Fong

Danielle Fong — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 22:55:58 +0000

Have you looked at Fortress? It has much more interesting typesetting; like coding in Latex, but… better.

By: Miller Peterson

Miller Peterson — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:41:51 +0000

I know what you mean about the home / end commands on macs. I used to use the home/end keys in the same way, but had to give it up since I switched to mac. Command-left / command-right are like home/end for macs, but it's not the same.

Having recently started using Eclipse for Java development after being strictly plain text-editor, I'm still getting used to all the sweet features it has - just being able to navigate method declarations and rename variables automatically is blowing my mind.

By: Nate Hollingsworth

Nate Hollingsworth — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 12:07:43 +0000

I use Visual Studio for my code (my work is all C#). Its really nice, but still lacks many features or the feature is there just very ackward to use (for example Go To Definition).

I really like your idea of turning coding text editors into hypertext. When tracking down a bug or trying to figure out why the code is so stupid, I spend a lot of time following the code path. Like you say it would be really nice to be able to see a visual code path somehow.

I think we need to get away from thinking of code as lines in a file. In the OO world we deal with objects and methods (mostly). So, we should be working with those primitives directly.

I completely agree that the coding environment really hasn't changed alot in the last 30 years.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:06:07 +0000

@Boris: No, TextMate doesn’t do smooth scrolling. You know, it’s not something I’ve ever really thought about, but it would be a nice touch.

By: Boris Bokowski

Boris Bokowski — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 09:17:17 +0000

I am still waiting for smooth scrolling in text editors, like it was implemented by Cygnus Ed (Amiga, ca. 1990), or nowadays on the iPhone. Both implementations are based on a model that make the sroll movement appear like that of physical objects, which is much easier on the eyes and brain compared to what all other text-displaying apps do. (Does TextMate do smooth scrolling?)

By: Patrick

Patrick — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:29:10 +0000

@David Mathers: Really? Can you give me some details about the vim plugins that can do this kind of thing?

@Jeremy Handcock: Interesting, I've never seen that kind of code visualization before, but not surprised that someone else has thought of it. I guess for profiling, the reason it's probably never caught on is that (a) most people never profile their code, and (b) finding the name of the top 5 or 10 hottest methods is usually good enough. Heat maps wouldn't be cool, but aren't necessarily that much more useful.

On the other hand, I could imagine code path indicators in a debugger to be really useful. Imagine you pull up your debugger to investigate a crash, and it shows the code path most recently taken through the method. Kind of a lightweight version of the rewindable debugger.

By: Jeremy Handcock

Jeremy Handcock — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 02:58:11 +0000

Great post, Patrick. This seems like a ripe area of research opportunities!

Me, I use Eclipse for Java and vi for everything else. This is mostly because they are the standard tools and I've never bothered to see if anything better is out there. Maybe I'll give TextMate a try.

It's not quite yet dead, but code visualization (ie. heat maps for profiled code) has never really caught on in a big way. I'm not sure why that is.

Your thoughts on supporting exploratory programming in an editor are really interesting. I'd like to see this in my editor for sure.