Re: "Adobe Brackets like" editing in emacs

[Lennart Borgman]

I have tested Brackets a bit the latest days, using it beside Emacs. It was not as integrated to the browser as I thought, but it is still useful. I have used it to edit CSS files and mixed files. It looks up all the places that it think might apply to an element in HTML. Unfortunately it does not seem to have one of those features I really would like: Parsing CSS media queries. It does not tell me which media query is used where and what the limits are for them. It does not even show the media queries at all in the Quick Edit (which is the feature we are discussing).

I think it is the same for CSS classes.

I guess they just stopped the development before implementing such useful features. It is of course quite a bit more complex to implement that part, both on the parsing level and UI level.

Still, it is useful. And implementing those simple features in Emacs would not be that hard, I think. A crucial part would be to setup the connection between different files. (A little bit of that is in nXhtml.)

And yes, it could be used with other languages too. Perhaps it can be useful for class-based languages, but that requires good parsing.

On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 10:21 PM, Mathias Dahl <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi Arthur,

This is a very interesting feature! Not only would it be useful for the scenario described by you and others in this thread, but I also think it would be useful for temporarily showing definitions from another place in the same file that you are editing. Sure, there are tooltips, overlays and whatnot that can do the same thing ("intellisense") but sometimes actually seeing the full definition right where you are might be useful. No need to jump back and forth, with a key you could show the definition of a function where you are, and with another key it would be hidden. You would be able to copy pieces of text from it and whatever. That being said, I have never ever seen a feature like this before, and that could be an indication that it is not actually useful, or no-one has thought of a crazy idea before the Adobe people did it...

/Mathias

On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 2:29 PM, arthur miller <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi,

my name is Arthur, and I just subscribed to this list. Though I am new to this list, I am not so new to Emacs.I have just a question/thought about a feature I would like see in Emacs, hope you don't mind.

Lately Adobes Brackets editor has got some popularity (It seems to be pretty much Emacs on _javascript_). I am not really into using it full time, since I am good with Emacs, but I do like the idea of mulitple file editing in one buffer. It is like context-aware multi-file editing or what it should be called. They use it to edit css or _javascript_ while editing html file, så that one does not have to switch between buffers/files. It seems pretty handy, and I would kind-a like to see implementation for C/C++ (macros, templates) and so on.

I think it shouldn't be impossible to do now, since Emacs already can split window and show multiple buffers. How difficult would it be to add a mode/feature to "expand" a buffer (split window) under the current line and load exact part of a file with of course correct langauge mode and so on. I guess semantic package would be needed since it seems to be similar context awareness as it is needed for code completition.

I am not knowledgable about Emacs internals, so I don't really know where to hack, but wonder if something similar is already implemented or "on the way".