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I've seen some videos of Canon Cat, but I must be missing something because I'm not aware of it being any sort of GUI. It looked to me like a text editor with
by ken 8y ago
I've seen some videos of Canon Cat, but I must be missing something because I'm not aware of it being any sort of GUI. It looked to me like a text editor with "no save" (always automatically synced to disk), and keyboard support for Emacs-style isearch (very cool).
For ideas on how to map keys to nodes/edges, there's other places I'd look. For example, lots of video games let you easily move along edges of a graph using just 4 (or 8) direction arrows.
"State transitions" are one very specific kind of graph, and my thought is a generic editor. Think lower level. State transitions as comic frames could be a major-mode that the user installs, if they know they'll need to edit a lot of transitions, but it should also support "I know nothing about this except it has nodes/edges", like fundamental-mode is for text.
- TuringTest 8y agoCanon Cat did not have graphical capabilities at the time, but its successor the Archy prototype had them. Instead of being mouse-centric like the Mac/Lisa, it was intended to handle graphical objects mostly or entirely by keyboard (like Emacs, but without modes), and Raskin had plans to make it work like an infinitely zoomable browser. The think with Archy is that it contained all the power of a command line for chaining commands, but it also worked on documents, all with a very well thought out interaction model that's easy to learn (in contrast with Emacs, which offers the same power but it's a nightmare to learn). Yeah, a low-level "graph editor" extensible library that could be plugged-in anywhere to provide a common interaction, that would be great. Things like tree widgets provide some of that, but of course they only support a specific subset of graphs.