[TxMt] Re: sublime text 2 (slightly OT)

[Steve King]

On 2011-05-13 13:00, Mario "Kuroir" Ricalde wrote:
> I'm still locked with Textmate because I developed lots and lots of 
> bundles and commands that save my day with the Ruby API TM provides. 
> And as far as I know, ST just supports Python for doing that. Which to 
> me is a deal breaker.

Too many applications are scriptable, but only in a limited set of 
languages. Most Mac apps support AppleScript to some degree, but then 
you're stuck programming in one of the worst languages known to man.  
(IMHO, of course!)  Windows apps sometimes implement VBA bindings, 
giving you the second worst language known to man.

My dream is for a plain-text scripting interface accessible via a 
socket. Binary objects (if necessary) could be base64 encoded.  It 
wouldn't have to be (and shouldn't be!) a full-blown language, just 
simple commands and responses. Control structures and other complex 
language features would be provided by the programmer's scripting 
language of choice, which could be *anything*. Ruby, python, perl, bash, 
C...  All it has to do is be able to read and write to a socket.

Would it be slow?  Maybe, but I think it'd be fast enough for 99% of the 
things people want to use scripting for.  TextMate's scripts just fork a 
sub process and communicate through stdio, after all.  It's the same 
concept, except instead of just sending the current word/line/document 
to the script's stdin and reading the result back from its stdout, the 
app and the script could have a real 2-way conversation.  Kind of a 
high-powered extension of the txmt:// interface.

And, I want a pony. :-)

-- 
Steve King
Sr. Software Engineer
Arbor Networks
+1 734 821 1461
www.arbornetworks.com <http://www.arbornetworks.com/>


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