A demo of the Tiled Text Engine, a framework for creating text editors of a new style, demonstrated through the GIDE app (Gestural IDE).

I wrote Tiled Text to get around a mouse/keyboard injury I have, and it is, more generally, software for escaping those devices. Things like motion sensors, joysticks, and multi-touch surfaces are relatively interchangeable as input devices enabled by the software. In the video I use a joystick.

I like the way people are starting to look at alternative approaches to text editing. Light Table has some good ideas, for example. This is a fun looking/sounding experience using an Xbox 360 controller but it doesn't address the issue of writing code on keyboard-less systems (yet, he mentions auto-completion based text editing is in the works). Writing massive amounts of code on a device without a traditional keyboard is painful and that's a difficult problem to solve.

Chris Granger recently published an article on a side project he had been working on; an IDE called Light Table. Some of the nice features he demonstrates in the video below are:

• As a program gets written you see it compile live on the right, providing a kind of real-time debugging. You could see what a webpage will look like as you code it.
• Moveable code blocks; instead of having multiple tabs/windows open for each file you are working with, you can have just the functions your working with on the screen.
• When you click on a function or class name you see it's docs and params on the right.
• Documentation finder with unique features like lookup by namespace.

The article created quite a stir on places like Hacker News. Because of which Chris published a follow-up article (HN), where he noted:

• It will be open source.
• Light Table is built on top of the CodeMirror editor so those interested in contributing should help out CodeMirror.
• It will support support plugins.
• Developers like myself who use VIM would be able to use VIM's keybindings (Emacs too, etc).

Since so many people expressed interest in the project, he has decided to dedicate more of his time to getting Light Table off the ground and there is now a kickstarter for Light Table.

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