An improved text editor

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Ant_222
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Jun 14, 2007 5:42 pm

An improved text editor

Post by Ant_222 »

Hi all!

Since FAR is a full-featured text mode file managar, why not implement a bit more powerful text editor aimed at not only reading text files and basic editing of config files and stuff, but also capable of editing normal texts, such as e-mails and readme's, with the possibility of various (text-mode, ascii-wise) formatting.

What I mean is, it should store paragraphs, not lines. That being done, it should support customizable left and right margins, paragraph justification and indentation (including tabulation to make hanging indents, lists and stuff) (stored in paragraph styles), maybe wrapping of (ascii) drawings, should one want to insert an ascii picture or table. And a more powerful thing than current "bookmarks" — cross-references with automatically-maintained integrity: once you change a referenced item, the reference is updated. Otherwise I have to use MS Word 97 to design nested lists (when writing specifications) in an easy way. But don't like Word so much!

Many features, huh? — but each of them is not that hard to do...

Again, such files should be stored in FAR's own format (since no suitable format doesn't come to my mind, maybe base it on XML) and then exported into plain ascii files for release. Of course, such text files will be intended for viewing in a fixed-with font.

In general, almost all powerful features of modern text processors are implementable in an ascii editor...

I don't think there already exist such editors that I'd like. MS Word 5.5 (for MSDOS) and alike are of course quite capable, but their inteface is FAR from effective...

As to the Emacs gender, it's very specific, and too complicated for many. User-friendliness, effectivess and simplicity should not suffer from powerful functions, but rather it must be supported by thereby.

As a not-very-good expansion of the basic text editor I can mention TheBat's. It can justify paragraphs, but it's all screwd up as soon as you insert a word in the middle of paragraph... And you must reformat it by selecting the paragraph and applying a commant to it.

However many ascii text editors I have tried (those which support formatting exportable to plain ascii files), all of them weren't even half way to be satisfactory for general-purpose text writing and ascii-formatting.

And another advantage: a buil-in editor is always at hand and has the pleasing text-mode look! and it's interface is unified with that of the other parts of FAR.

Not being a C/C++ coder, I'd be glad to help with the design new functionality and interface.

P.S.: Didn't post in the plug-in section because wasn't sure your API allows for suc plug-ins, for it's not doable as a bunch of editor plug-ins and implies modification of the editor itself instead of making plug-in(s) for it.
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