Source
- URL: https://x.com/rfleury/status/1263870017365348353
- Author: Ryan Fleury (@rfleury)
- Posted: 2020-05-22 16:31:08
Thread
1/ @rfleury
@yunruse @cullend @GolerGkA @star_door_ @kevinwatters
Haha, very true! In my mind, the preferable UI/UX model for an AST editor is an open question right now, but what I will say is that even the simplest possible controls I thought of turned out to be preferable over text. Operations that are singular in semantic meaning… (1/5)
2/ @rfleury
@yunruse @cullend @GolerGkA @star_door_ @kevinwatters
…actually end up being mapped to a singular control, bringing intention of the user much closer to consequences. An example is making a struct. In a text editor, that’s several keypresses (‘struct’, ‘name’, ’{’, ‘\n’, so on). In the simplest scheme here, it’s one. (2/5)
3/ @rfleury
@yunruse @cullend @GolerGkA @star_door_ @kevinwatters
Just from using the editor myself as it is right now, this has been a much more comfortable editing experience, because there is less busywork when it comes to specifying some semantic concept. (3/5)
4/ @rfleury
@yunruse @cullend @GolerGkA @star_door_ @kevinwatters
At some point I realized that it isn’t much different from any other kind of program. If we build an image editor, we don’t ask the artist to type “save”, we give them a button to do so, and once they are comfortable, we also have a keybinding. (4/5)
5/ @rfleury
@yunruse @cullend @GolerGkA @star_door_ @kevinwatters
Furthermore, code is just another form of data, so we can develop editors for it in the same way. I think this can improve input paradigms a lot, and can get us to a place where our programming tools are much smarter and more capable. (5/5)