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I never cared about structural editors because the argument always seemed to be that being able to ruin the parse (going from a state where it parses to one whe

I never cared about structural editors because the argument always seemed to be that being able to ruin the parse (going from a state where it parses to one where it doesn’t) with your editor is bad. Because I don’t care: I want the supreme flexibility of going from state A to B through some ill-formed textual editing much more than I want to be protected from ending up in a bad parse state, since syntax errors are one of the more simple things that a programmer has to deal with. But I am perfectly willing to embrace structural editing if it makes editors much, much more efficient and less complex (e.g. you don’t need to cache things). Maybe things become “janky” because many of us are a bit too good at limiting source files to at the most 1K lines, so we tolerate the minor hickups that we encounter?

bradrn 4y ago
> I want the supreme flexibility of going from state A to B through some ill-formed textual editing Seems like the author agrees with you (albeit in a different article): > … the traditional structural editors do tend to impose some limitations … But these are not the inherent qualities of structural editing. This is just the way someone chose to implement it. So, when I say that Rune provides seamless structural editing, what I mean is that the other kind of choices are possible: the kind where you are editing as if the structure is only apparent, but not in your face, and so, it's just like there are no seams. — https://project-mage.org/the-power-of-structure#orgeb59167 https://project-mage.org/the-power-of-structure#orgeb59167
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  Yup. Apparently.[1] Seems that we agree that your typical structural editor is either too gimped or to inflexible to be useful. But I believe him when he writes that it is possible to make a unified language for editing all kinds of structures. I certainly wouldn’t wanna learn a new editing mode for every little yaml/json/java/rust/yaml-superset/yaml-superset-superset. [1] But I don’t have time right now to read that main article to find out, since Firefox claims that it is a 2 hour+ read. :p

bradrn 4y ago

> I want the supreme flexibility of going from state A to B through some ill-formed textual editing Seems like the author agrees with you (albeit in a different article): > … the traditional structural editors do tend to impose some limitations … But these are not the inherent qualities of structural editing. This is just the way someone chose to implement it. So, when I say that Rune provides seamless structural editing, what I mean is that the other kind of choices are possible: the kind where you are editing as if the structure is only apparent, but not in your face, and so, it's just like there are no seams. — https://project-mage.org/the-power-of-structure#orgeb59167 https://project-mage.org/the-power-of-structure#orgeb59167

avgcorrection 4y ago
Yup. Apparently.[1] Seems that we agree that your typical structural editor is either too gimped or to inflexible to be useful. But I believe him when he writes that it is possible to make a unified language for editing all kinds of structures. I certainly wouldn’t wanna learn a new editing mode for every little yaml/json/java/rust/yaml-superset/yaml-superset-superset. [1] But I don’t have time right now to read that main article to find out, since Firefox claims that it is a 2 hour+ read. :p