Yesterday I managed to write some code should be very useful in creating a structured sexp editor plugin for Gedit. Need to clean it up a little bit, then post it to GitHub.
It's interesting how parsing for an editor needs to take into account detailed position information, whitespace and comments information (one of the tasks I want to accomplish is switching items in a sexp list without disturbing the existing layout - if possible - and move comments attached to an item along with the item). I previously thought that moving text chunks like that would require a very smart pretty printer, it turns out that may not be required.
However, there are still problems with languages with a more complicated syntax. I need to implement a parser for a simplified Basic to test the pretty printer-less approach in a more realistic setting.
Structured editing of sexp has long been accomplished in Emacs and lisp modes. I think it would be really interesting to see that extended to other languages, based on a lisp-like parse tree of the code.
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