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Creating a WYSIWYG GUI markdown editor - Bad idea to emulate vim features vs. embed neovim? (lemy.lol)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I want to create a WYSIWYG editor for markdown, and I want it to be keyboard-driven with vim editing philosophy.

I want the editor to have rich formatting, rather than the equally spaced cells of characters in the terminal. This would enable rows having different text sizes, usage of non-monospaced fonts, editing RTL languages such as arabic or hebrew, and bypass other terminal limitations.

Embedding neovim would be nice in theory, enabling all compatible vim features. But it seems to come with great difficulties, since I am forgoing the entire rendering philosophy that neovim depends on (equally spaced cells of the terminal).

SO I am thinking it would be better to emulate the vim features I want, starting with basic keybindings and motions, and go from there. But I am worried that I might end up regret this choice? It seems that embedding neovim is too monumental of a task for what I want to do. Am I mistaken?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Best of luck! Sounds like a cool project.

Not sure if NeoVim uses tree-sitter as the default syntax highlighter, but it will give you Abstract Syntax Tree info if you can jack into it for the document so you don't have to parse the markdown. Your WYSIWYG view just has to translate the AST which may help with removing style symbols.

One of many ways to tackle I'm sure.