Comment by espadrine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by espadrine | Hacker News Reader

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> it looks like this is a GitHub-aware/integrated text editor that targets both desktop (Mac, at least) and web

I can confirm, from looking at the code.

It uses CSS / LESS for highlighting, and CoffeeScript for client-side programming (eg, the fuzzy completion[0], or the autocompletion).

The surprising part is that the editor doesn't seem to be a fork of either Ace or CodeMirror, the two big guys in the field. The highlighters (ie, syntax files) are in CSON. Ace is probably the closest, but it uses a completely different structure[2].

A negative impact of that is the low number of syntax files. However, there seems to be a 1-to-1 equivalence to tmLanguage (TextMate) syntax files[3].

[0]: https://github.com/atom/fuzzaldrin/blob/master/src/filter.co...

[1]: https://github.com/atom/language-toml/blob/master/grammars/t...

[2]: https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace/blob/master/lib/ace/mode/asci...

[3]: https://github.com/textmate/toml.tmbundle/blob/master/Syntax...

Interesting. The whole Sublime Text theory takes another buff.

The tmLanguage syntaxing, while limiting, is still pretty damn easy to create and edit, thus I approve. The idea that you have to learn a new way to build new syntaxes for every editor out there is a big issue for me as if you're going to be on the edge using new templating syntaxes, flavors of other languages etc. you just have to be able to fiddle with syntax highlighting, especially with new editors with poor/incomplete syntaxes and few user created syntaxes to fill the holes.

I hope they won't use this awkward "double-escaped backward-slashes in reglular expressions" environment. YAML[1] is much better for this.

[1]: https://github.com/SublimeText/AAAPackageDev/blob/master/Syn...

> I hope they won't use this awkward "double-escaped backward-slashes in reglular expressions"

Yes, they will[0]. YAML is definitely better, but I believe they have a strong opinion against YAML[1].

[0]: https://github.com/atom/language-toml/blob/master/grammars/t...

[1]: https://github.com/mojombo/toml

so the grammars are still a bunch of regexes? that'd be kind of a letdown

IntelliJ is pretty nice on this point. You write a PEG-style parser and get a full AST. It is a lot of work, but the payoff is pretty nice and they have a lot of solid tooling to help you out.

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