I am writing a Flex lexer and Bison parser for a plaintext file format using a sort of vertical parallelism: two characters that are in the same column are inherently associated with one another.
I am fine writing this file format in a plain text editor, but I should eventually work on creating a text editor that is customized to accelerate composition of my format. I have a few things in mind, but I will suppose anything that can be made to do this can be made to do the rest:
Suppose the user is on the tenth column, and presses downarrow with a modifier like Alt. Newline and space will be automatically inserted, such that their cursor will appear on the tenth column.
Returning a hexadecimal value dependent on precisely how long a key is held down (with modifier key).
I am an Ubuntu user and I use Gedit and Nano to edit files. And I know of Vim and Emacs but I suppose none of these were written to be very forkable: surely a smaller and kinder code would be more conducive instead. Or could Emacs just do it with some native macro function?