An Emacs alternative which exposes a text model to a scriptable environment?

Question

Hello, everybody out there!

I'm currently seeking for a technical solution to create a nice literate programming environment. Unfortunately, most editors are too much hard coded, and their functionalities just cover most famous needs, and can't cleanly cover special needs.

I came to Emacs (later after some others), but I also came to numerous troubles with Emacs (I will not talk about these, this is not the topic).

However, there is one thing I like with Emacs and which was indeed matching what I was looking for: it exposes a full text model to a scriptable environment, and the overall UI is designed so it is well suited to either graphical UIs or text UIs (because it is mostly text based). And last but not least, this is scriptable with a kind of LISP, and LISP indeed seems a good choice to me, in the area of text manipulation and interpretation.

I've searched the web for a text editor which would expose a full text model to a scriptable environment, but I have not found anything. I guess this is not an everyday request on the web, so it is probably better to ask some humans about it, better than to ask a robot.

I was, but in short, I'm looking for: an editor which exposes a full text model [*], and which exposes this model to a script engine (preferably LISP, but I would enjoy Python as well, or any others after all).

[*] Talking about text model, I mean: text attributes (optionally font face), text visibility, text read-write property, and text content iteration, at a level as low as the character basis.

Have a nice day! :)

--

Yannick Duchêne

Answer 1

JEdit seems very scriptable with Java, BeanShell and other languages targeting the JVM. Most of it's functionality is implemented with OSGI plugins. If you really like LISP, maybe you could even try with Clojure! :-)

Answer 2

Emacs, Climacs, Portable Hemlock (and to some extent Hemlock).

I am sure there are other editors around that exposes a full text model to a script engine that are NOT in "the emacs family", but I don't know them.

Oh, yes, there's the VMS editor framework, but I cannot recall its name.

Answer 3

What Vatine said, plus there's a very minimal Scheme editor built into Fluxus, which I extended with Emacs key-bindings (in my personal copy), so I know it would work as something close to a stubbed implementation (if you rip out all the OpenGL stuff).

Edit: Looks like I was working with fluxus-0.8, which doesn't even seem to be on the site anymore. If you end up needing to go that low-level to start, let me know and I'll send it over.

Answer 4

Not sure if this is useful, but there is a long list of Emacs-like editors: http://www.finseth.com/emacs.html

Btw., Craig A. Finseth also wrote a book on implementing an Emacs-like editor: http://www.finseth.com/craft/

The Book as PDF.

Answer 5

Report of an (unsuccessfully) ending quest :

Although a possible technical choice I could figure will not work for me (see later), I still point it here, if this can ever be useful to someone running UNIX-Like (I'm running Windows).

Context and state of the “ art ” : near to all (or all) so called Emacsen and Emacs clone, has nothing to compare with Emacs. They just mimics terms like major mode an minor mode, mimics key-bindings, and most of time also, the UI look and feel. But the core is not there. I've learned these are called “ Emacs Ersatz ”.

Disclaimer : for some reasons, I have not tested Climax and Hemlock, so the latter comment does not apply to these.

EFuns : the last one I came to, was EFuns, but unfortunately, I could not compile it on Windows (I suspect something is wrong with the sources, some directory are missing in the archive). Interested parties may get it here : EFuns, an Emacs-like scripted in OCaml. Fortunately for UNIX-Like users, binaries are provided (not for Windows).

Implementations List : to complete the list Rainer Joswig pointed to, here is another one, shorter, but more up-to-date : [ Sorry I can't post this link, it seems I'm not allowed to post more than one link - I'm sorry for interested parties (sad) ]