roc/editor/editor-ideas.md

(For background, this talk has an overview of the design goals for the editor.)

Editor Ideas

Here are some ideas and interesting resources for the editor. Feel free to make a PR to add more!

Sources of Potential Inspiration

These are potentially inspirational resources for the editor's design.

Package-specific editor integrations

(Or possibly module-specific integrations, type-specific integrations, etc.)

• What FP can learn from Smalltalk by Aditya Siram
• Moldable development by Tudor Gîrba
• Unity game engine
  • Scripts can expose values as text inputs, sliders, checkboxes, etc or even generate custom graphical inputs
  • Drag-n-drop game objects and component into script interfaces
• How to Visualize Data Structures in VS Code

Live Interactivity

• Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction by Bret Victor
• 7 Bret Victor talks
• Against the Current by Chris Granger
• Sketch-n-Sketch: Interactive SVG Programming with Direct Manipulation by Ravi Chugh
• Xi modern text editor with concurrent editing (related to Druid)
• Self programming language

Debugging

• VS code debug visualization
• Algorithm visualization for javascript

Structured Editing

• Deuce (videos on the right) by Ravi Chugh and others

• Fructure: A Structured Editing Engine in Racket by Andrew Blinn

• Hazel: A Live FP Environment with Typed Holes by Cyrus Omar

• Dark Demo by Ellen Chisa

• Introduction to JetBrains MPS by Kolja Dummann

• Eve

  • code editor as prose writer
  • live preview
  • possible inspiration for live interactivity as well

• Unreal Engine 4

  • Blueprints visual scripting (not suggesting visual scripting for Roc)

• Live Programing by [Microsoft Research] it contains many interesting research papers.

Non-Code Related Inspiration

• Scrivner writing app for novelists, screenwriters, and more
• Word processors (Word, Google Docs, etc)
  • Comments that are parallel to the text of the document.
  • Comments can act as discussions and not just statements.
  • Easy tooling around adding tables and other stylised text
• Excel and Google Sheets
  • Not sure, maybe something they do well that we (code editors) could learn from

General Thoughts/Ideas

Thoughts and ideas possibly taken from above inspirations or separate.

• ACCESSIBILITY!!!
• From Google Docs' comments, adding tests in a similar manner, where they exists in the same "document" but parallel to the code being written
  • Makes sense for unit tests, keeps the test close to the source
  • Doesn't necessarily make sense for integration or e2e testing
  • Maybe easier to manually trigger a test related to exactly what code you're writing
• "Error mode" where the editor jumps you to the next error
  • Similar in theory to diff tools that jump you to the next merge conflict
• dependency recommendation