A Code Editor with Powerful Layout

Text editors have often been a favourite hobby hacking project. There's a lot of innovation going on in user interface, extensibility, and networking. One thing I haven't seen a lot of is a text/code editor with a powerful layout engine.

By powerful I mean that it has support for nested layout structures, and accurate placing of elements. A few editors have powerful enough editing widgets that allow pictures and interactive buttons. Emacs allows a fair bit of this and the plt-scheme environment allows embedding richer data into code. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like it is possible to place elements fairly accurately.

I want a framework to play around with layout ideas for code. We're still stuck with colors and indentation as the only way to emphasize various pieces of code. The design world has huge collections of techniques and strategies for indicating hierarchies, important pieces, and the relationship between elements. Also, so much time is spent looking through and reading code that anything that makes it nicer would probably quite appreciated.

Surprisingly, I actually started on this one already, though it'll be a while before I get a working version out. I've decided that for my project, the TeX way of layout will bring out a good balance of power and efficiency. A good introduction the TeX layout is "A Functional Description of TeX's Formula Layout" by Heckmann and Wilhelm. TeX uses aligned boxes, which are nested, to setup its layout. This means that the underlying data structure doesn't support rotating elements, which I think is reasonable to expect. You do however, gain an incredibly flexible system, that let's you position elements very precisely, with the nesting making some tasks a lot simpler.

Ok, this is still very vague sounding, but the way I hope that this works is that you have some code, which is roughly parsed to get the parts that are important for layout.

The results of the parse are then sent to the layout engine, which is custom made for the parser. It takes the parse tree, and produces a layout in box format, which is then drawn on the screen, using a graphics library like Cairo. The first version would probably be output only. It would only do layout once, without worrying about local updates in between.

This first version would already be quite useful though, once it is up, you can start to create different layout engines, and try out different ideas. The main thing I want to play around with first is the way hierarchies are displayed. Indentation is nice, but in most editors is sort of limited. With a box format, we can play around with laying out blocks of code side by side, changing the indent distance based on the context, maybe even some light borders in the right places.