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Re: [RFC] improve nano's interface toward external tools


From: Benno Schulenberg
Subject: Re: [RFC] improve nano's interface toward external tools
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2021 14:06:07 +0100
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Op 03-01-2021 om 02:56 schreef Saagar Jha:
> [...] but there are still places where it seems like it is missing some
> things that other editors have had for quite a long time.

Nano never looked at other editors.  For the longest of times nano's only
goal was to be a copy of Pico -- with a few improvements here and there.
This has changed only since version 4.0, two years ago.

> Extensions points, in general, seem perfect for me for an editor like nano. 
> Some of the things I mentioned already serve as those and they are pretty 
> powerful for the amount of code that went into them [...]

The linter required a horrible amount of code.  I wish Chris had never
added it.  But I didn't have the heart to kill it.

> One could imagine nano adding the ability to autocomplete [...]

"One" maybe, but I certainly can't imagine that: for every keystroke run
code to try and find the things that could complete the current fragment
and present them onscreen...  What a horrible waste of CPU cycles!  For me
the attraction of nano is not just its small binary size but also that it
uses the CPU sparingly.

> The beauty of this approach is that the amount of code that would actually
> have to go into nano is non-trivial but not huge, and then you can literally
> start offloading features to people who are interested in it, [...]

Sure, sounds good.  If you have a specific idea for an extension point
and can give two different examples of how this point could be used by
an external script, then let's hear it.

Benno

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