[Ometa] OMeta in Qute, an experimental text editor

[Justin Chase]

Hello!

I was hoping to hear what some other people had to say first but this group
is pretty quiet lately. So I thought I would let you know that I read this
and found it interesting. Good work!

I don't know the answers to the question about markdown parsers in ometa
but as to the question about what kind of features I would like to see I
would say that ideally you would have a way of displaying input, grammar
and output all at the same time. I like how you double click to edit a
paragragh then edit the markdown and click again to swap back but I would
personally like to see them both at the same time.

I can't seem to find any videos online anymore but there was this thing a
couple years ago called MGrammar that is based on some Microsoft project
that is now defunct. But it actually had this really cool mode for editing
grammars, here are some screenshots:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/intellipad/archive/2008/10/29/creating-and-editing-mgrammar-files-with-intellipad.aspx


Unfortunately that was about the only thing that was cool about it and now
it is just a memory. And the UI in those examples are probably not up to
your standards but basically what I'm saying is that on the left panel you
would have some input, in the middle you have your grammar and on the right
side is the output, errors below. And as you edit either the grammar or the
input it would rapidly, dynamically update the errors and output panels. It
was pretty incredible. That rapid feedback loop is extremely productive.
You would just tweak your grammar one character at a time in tricky places
and watch how it affected the output. I would highly recommend something
like that in your editor. I'm not sure how you would translate that to your
UI but that is my suggestion :)

Good luck! It looks good so far.

On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 3:55 PM, Felix Breuer <felix at fbreuer.de> wrote:

> Hello everyone!
>
> Qute <http://www.inkcode.net/qute> is an experimental text editor that I
> have been working on from time to time. The idea behind Qute is that you
> edit your document in a text based markup language, but what you see most
> of the time is a fully typeset rendering of it. (Pictures explain it
> better. <http://blog.felixbreuer.net/2011/06/30/qute.html>) Up to now,
> Markdown has been the only markup language available in Qute. My goal,
> however, is to allow users to define and use their own markup languages,
> right inside the document they are working on. And to that end I want to
> use OMeta.
>
>
> I released Qute 0.4.1 on Sunday, including rudimentary OMeta integration.
> Qute 0.4.1 allows you to
>
> * define OMeta grammars within Markdown documents, and
> * write individual paragraphs in your custom language and then use the
> OMeta grammar to transform it into a fully typeset rendering.
>
> You can use several different grammars in parallel and some very basic
> form of parse error reporting is included. Again, pictures explain it
> better. <http://blog.felixbreuer.net/2012/03/11/qute.html>
>
>
> For this feature to be truly useful, I plan to include some useful OMeta
> grammars (and transformers) that users can extend in OMeta. The idea is
> that users can extend, e.g., Markdown syntax with custom commands and
> environments (just as users can do in LaTeX). However, I am not set on
> Markdown as a base language. So:
>
> * Do you know of any Markdown parser written in OMeta? Do you have
> experience with implementing parsers for lightweight markup languages of
> this type? I have found this PEG<https://github.com/jgm/peg-markdown/blob/master/markdown_parser.leg>for Markdown, but as it is pretty big, I am not sure this is the right
> point to start.
> * What markup languages (of any kind) would you like to use in an editor
> such as Qute?
>
>
> The next thing I wanted to ask is: What features would the OMeta community
> like to see in an editor such as Qute? Obviously, Qute is not intended to
> evolve into a full-fleged IDE for parsers and transformers, but still there
> are ways in which Qute might make working with OMeta more pleasant. Two
> such features I could think of are a) more convenient error reporting and
> b) pretty-printing of OMeta code. Both would essentially boil down to
> writing an OMeta transformer that maps an OMeta AST to a useful and
> visually appealing HTML snippet. Are there any pretty-printers that take
> OMeta code and produce HTML out there? Also Qute might serve as a literate
> programming environment for OMeta.
>
>
> Finally, I want to ask for general feedback. Qute is still very rough
> around the edges - especially the OMeta integration is more of a
> proof-of-concept than a finished product. (In fact, I plan to rewrite Qute
> from the ground up sometime in the future in order to include basic stuff
> such as undo/redo.) Nonetheless, I am curious to hear about any suggestions
> that you may have!
>
>
> Best,
> Felix
>
>
>
> --
> http://www.felixbreuer.net
>
> _______________________________________________
> OMeta mailing list
> OMeta at vpri.org
> http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/ometa
>
>


-- 
Justin Chase
http://www.justinmchase.com
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