Re: [dev] Sandy editor

On 5/29/11, Rafa Garcia Gallego <rafael.garcia.gallego_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> Thinking about a couple of issues now:
>
> 1.- The regexes used for syntax highlight relied on a GNU extension
> (\< \> to mark word boundaries). We changed those to \b, which is the
> POSIX equivalent, but some testing has determied this does not work in
> some systems (MacOS as far as we know).
>
> We looked at alternative regex engine implementations, but they either
> suck (perl and the like) or do not implement the rather-useful \b (go,
> plan9). Maybe it's time for a suckless regex library? Maybe we should
> extend plan9's libregexp?

Maybe it syntax highlighting should be dropped for now, for the sake
of simplicity? The door would always be open for adding it again
later, once you've found a regex library that you're happy with which
can be used to implement highlighting nicely. (Or just drop
highlighting and leave it that way -- wouldn't bother me ;)

> 2.- There is a (very) limited subset of keys we can bind to to comply
> with everyone's requests: there are 33 Control chars: Control +
> @A-Z[\]^_? but some are taken (^[ is ESC, ^I is TAB, ^M and/or ^J is
> Enter). Because of the way terminals work, we can't bind to
> Control+Shift... no wonder they used to call them dumb terminals.
>
> I have tried to reduce the number of bindings to use, but going below
> 30 seems impossible if we want full keyboard control. There are a few
> ways to go from here, but they mostly suck:
>
> ...

When it comes to keybindings you're never going to make everbody
happy, so aim for a simple set of default keybindings; those who don't
like them can change them, add more, etc. Just try to avoid things
that a majority of people will probably not like, such as Emacs style
chained keybindings.

John
Received on Tue May 31 2011 - 04:15:23 CEST