external editors
external editors
- Subject: external editors
- From: Warren Leach <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2002 15:00:29 -0800
Our product is an integrated development environment for the
typesetting language TeX. In pre-OSX MacOS, we've written a
TextEdit-based source code editor. Since our market is programmers,
the most common request from customers was that they wanted to use
their favorite brand of editor (BBEdit, Alpha, Vi/VIM, Emacs, etc.).
Our solution was to develop an Apple Event suite to interact with
external editors. Plug-ins were developed for Alpha and BBedit to
connect our suite.
For the Carbon port of our product, we will again have our built-in
source code editor. But I'm unsure which the best approach to take
for an external editor interface.
We need to be coupled pretty closely to the editor (which is why we
write our own). Our application needs to see each keystroke for
instant syntax checking and to be able to set the cursor position to
point to errors. We also need to know where the cursor is within the
editor so we can show the corresponding position in the TeX typeset
output. We were able to get much of this functionality with pre-OSX
systems using editor plug-ins and Apple Events, but it wasn't ideal.
Would it be efficient to write wrappers for command line editors like
VI and Emacs to interact with them? And use similar wrappers to
issue Apple Events to BBEdit? Is there a better way?
Advice sought.
Warren Leach
Blue Sky Research