On Apr 12, 2018, at 12:55 PM, Harry Binswanger mailto:hb@xxxxxxxx wrote:
2) Given the speed of modern processors, would it be feasible to write an XPL
interpreter in a language accessible to or hooked into (if that's the right phrase) existing text or 'programming' editors?
Can you explain that a little? Would the input be XPL and the output be, say Python? Or are you talking about going the other way around? Or some third alternative.
Since many of use have XPL programs that do interesting things, I was thinking about something that would read in XPL and output some language like Python that links into quite a few editors and word processors.
And a related question:
In text/programming editors such as TextMate, how difficult would it be to mimic the
format-coding-hiding-and-revealing behaviour of XyWrite? Is there an editor that would make this
easy to accomplish? I rarely want anything approaching WYSIWYG, but it
is much easier to write in XyWrite if the codes are hidden in the triangles.
In Notepad++, what I do is set a very small font-size and very light color for things I
don't want to see most of the time. Since N++ has only monospaced fonts, this is not a great
solution. (You could hide them totally by selecting white on white as the color
of the text to hide, but the "hidden" stuff would still take up spaces.)
When I want to see the codes, I specify "Normal Text" under the "language" menu item.
Here are screenshots of HTML tags minimized and not minimized:
http://harrybinswanger.com/N++_screenshots.htm; eudora="autourl">http://harrybinswanger.com/N++_screenshots.htm
Neat! Taking up space is not so much an issue as is interfering with the visual flow of the text when proofreading or writing. Your solution looks pretty good.
I'm using Mac (Parallels when I really want Windows, and something like DOSBox for DOS), so Notepad++ isn't the most convenient solution. I have owned TextMate for years, but have never been a power user. With a little work it might do what I
want in the way of hiding markup and formatting codes, as it seems designed specifically to allow
users to create "grammars" for programming languages. There is no obvious reason why
XyWrite documents could not be treated as a different kind of program code
to be edited in TextMate. This is what the manual says about "grammars":
Language grammars are used to assign names to document elements such as keywords, comments, strings or
similar. The purpose of this is to allow styling (syntax highlighting) and to make the text editor
“smart” about which context the caret is in. For example you may want a key stroke or
tab trigger to act differently depending on the context, or you may want
to disable spell check as you type those portions of your text document which are not prose (e.g. HTML tags).
Myron
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