A text editor that I can fork - or guidance toward an emacs macro

Question

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:

1. 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.

2. 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?

Answer 1

You can try the CudaText editor (written in Lazarus). But better don’t fork it, rather make a plugin, which does all the functionality for hotkeys. Plugin can handle on_key, on_key_up events, so it can perform any actions after key presses. Refer to CudaText API wiki for info.

Together with a plugin you will need to make the lexer, for you syntax, and bind the plugin to the lexer via .inf file.