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What's the plan for plugins? Will they need to be compiled?

I haven't started implementing plugins yet, so details are still vague. General thoughts, they communicate with the core through a simple JSON-based protocol, so can be written in any language you like. I imagine Python will be one of the popular choices. Among other things, they'll be able to annotate the text with rich-text spans, for things like syntax coloring. Also, I'm planning for them to be async, so they won't slow typing even when they're busy computing.

My personal dream would be to have an editor that acts mostly like VIM, but with folding capability like Code Browser (http://tibleiz.net/code-browser/) -- would that be possible to achieve with this?

How do you plan to encode binary data in your JSON-based protocol? Base64? This will only increase the overhead.

While the human readability of JSON is nice, it has some serious flaws when the goal is to handle arbitrary data.

I have yet to decide what kind of protocol to use in my own vis editor[1], hence why I'm asking.

[1] https://github.com/martanne/vis

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