Andy Matuschak on Twitter: "Was trying to define interaction semantics for a textual canvas for writing SRS prompts. Surprisingly hard to define coherent semantics for complex structure editors! Really helped to realize that you want to maintain invariants; e.g.: S + return + delete = S S + cut + paste = S" / Twitter

Was trying to define interaction semantics for a textual canvas for writing SRS prompts. Surprisingly hard to define coherent semantics for complex structure editors! Really helped to realize that you want to maintain invariants; e.g.: S + return + delete = S S + cut + paste = S

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Orbit

@withorbit

· Oct 20, 2021

I spent the last week or so trying to create a continuous textual canvas for Orbit's list editor, so that you can move and select freely across prompt boundaries as if it were a "normal" text editor. Doable, I think, but just too painful to implement. I give up for now!

11:11 PM · Oct 21, 2021TweetDeck

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Once I realized that I needed to maintain those invariants, the behavior for "pressing return when you have a range R selected" was almost fully constrained. But of course *implementing* these semantics is still awful. :)

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Oct 21, 2021

The presence of all these inversion invariants makes me think there's some "primitive" way to define the interaction semantics for a given schema, from which you could derive the rest. But text editing is full of all kinds of edge cases, so probably not possible in practice.

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