[Toybox] Editors and such.

David Seikel onefang at gmail.com
Mon Jun 25 14:04:54 PDT 2012


I've gone through the features of those editors we have mentioned in
this thread, and compiled a list of most of those features.  Separated
them into "basic infrastructure" "basic editing", "advanced editing",
and "code editing".  It's a long list, even if you leave out advanced
and code editing.  On the other hand, a lot would just be options to
common functions, or is already covered by the full screen handling
library.

So now to come up with a design for the generic editing library that
can cater for most of that.  And leaves scope for more advanced stuff
to be bolted on.

One thing I'm wondering about.  A lot of these editors where written
for the days of really slow serial connections.  I see three use cases
for this - direct console / xterm access (including on your smart
phone), ssh over the Internet or local network, and high speed serial
connection to an embedded computer on your desk (or emulator).  I don't
know if serial over modem access would be common.  So there's a fair
amount of "cater to really slow connections" stuff which I don't
think we need.  Also a fair bit of "cater for dumb terminal" which the
basic "anything modern can understand ANSI escapes" design principle
leaves out.

Not worrying about these things means we don't complicate the code with
lots of optimizations for how much we output, or using fancy ANSI
escapes for scrolling existing text and such. I think we can get away
with that.

-- 
A big old stinking pile of genius that no one wants
coz there are too many silver coated monkeys in the world.
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