Better editor in Mathematica
- To: mathgroup@smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg12325] Better editor in Mathematica
- From: "Barthelet, Luc" <lucb@ea.com>
- Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 18:52:13 -0400
So now that we have all complained about the bugs and the missing features, who is interested in putting together a meaningful proposal (design) for the editor we need? Here are some ideas: 1) To be robust, it should stay simple. Building more complexity above the current editor would make it less stable. 2) We do not want to go backwards and loose existing features like the ability to edit formulas. If anyone can think of features that are a pure waste, please comment. 3) We should move close to existing editing capabilities and not reinvent a new paradigm. It seems that the problem is mostly the lack of tools we have to edit large "programming" like modules. I suggest the following: Add a new cell display mode "programming". Buy keeping the mode separated, we do not loose any feature, and donot impact the "robstness" of Mathematica.It would work like an input cell, but would display text "as is" with the following 2 extra features: 1) ability to change color. 2) indent text (by adding tabs) and draw vertical lines between opening and closing of brackets (square and curly) that are not on the same line (those lines are drawn before the text and are light grey so that they do not disturb reading. It would not be able to: a) deal with formula b) use subscript (that's a real bummer for when you want touse the notation, but it will make things so much simpler). c) change font, or style. Colorization would work the following way: colors would be user definable. Colorize all key words from Mathematica in one color (blue) Colorize comments in another color (magenta) Colorize strings (green?) Colorization does or does not occur everytime a key is pressed, it could happen also at user request (F-key) indent: like in most program editor, user controls everything with tabs, but the rule to return to the line are the usual ones. Another possible feature woud be the creation of Mathematica driven comments. They could be like (*: If[ asdja>0 *) with a colon after the (* which means that the comment was added by Mathematica and not by the user. Those comments could be added after the closing brackets that are far away from opening. it would include the Symbol name preceeding the opening brack, and in some circumstance the first 10 characters following the bracket. Example of commercial editors that represent some of what I describe above: 1) Object Master from Altura: http://www.altura.com 2) Visual C++ (still missing a bunch of stuff) 3) Multi edit. Voila, I hope this helps and we can have a meaningful discussion in this newsgroups to make some progress on the subject. Luc Barthelet General Manager, Maxis, an Electronic Arts Company Mayor of SimCity at night. http://www.maxis.com/games/simcity3000/frame.html