Synless is a code editor that is not a text editor. It is under development.
Navigate and edit code as a tree. To delete an element of a list, you move your cursor onto it and hit backspace. Contrast this to text editors where you must also delete the comma after the list element... unless it's the first element of the list in which case you have to delete the comma after it... unless it's also the only element in which case you don't delete any comma. We have been editing code at the wrong level of abstraction.
No syntax errors. You can't end up with (e.g.) mismatched brackets because there's no mechanism to insert or delete a single bracket. It's not a thing you can put your cursor on. The brackets don't even appear in memory: while a document is being edited, Synless stores it as a tree, not as text.
Context menu (WIP). Since Synless knows the syntax of the language you're editing, it can show you what's allowed syntactically to go where. (There currently is a context menu, but it isn't smart about filtering the kinds of nodes you're allowed to insert.)
Leave holes in your code. Synless supports holes, which represent a piece of code that hasn't yet been written. This is essential for practical editing.
Reformat on the fly. Synless pretty prints the part of the document you're viewing every time it redraws the screen, so if you resize the window it will reformat the code to fit instead of needing to hard-wrap. It does so using the dramatically over-engineered partial pretty printing library.
Language Agnostic (WIP). Synless is written to be able to support editing multiple languages. Adding a language requires giving a parser, pretty printer, and tree grammar for it. Currently the only supported language is JSON, and there are tricky UI questions around making a good editing experience for larger languages, but this is the goal we've been working towards since the beginning.
Customize your language's syntax. Synless is so named because it's about
removing the centrality of syntax from the way that we think about languages.
When editing a JavaScript file (not yet supported), if you think the keyword
function is too long you ought to have the power to change its display
notation and make it say fn instead.
Languages without parsers (WIP). One of the goals of Synless it to support the creation of languages that don't have parsers. It will be able to store a document's tree strucure directly in a format that's generic and trivially machine parsable (perhaps s-expressions, or JSON, or a binary format). This way the language needs only a pretty printer (for displaying the code in Synless), not a parser, and pretty printers are much easier to write.
Scriptable. Synless is scriptable and customizable in Rhai.
- If you don't have Rust, install it.
- Navigate to the
synless/directory and runcargo run --release. - Press "space" then "o" to open or create a JSON file.
There's no tutorial yet, but the context menu on the right will show you the actions you can perform at any point.
Synless is in alpha. It may eat your files. Please open an issue if it does.