Tiled Text – a Different Approach to Editing Text

March 1 2013, 3:09pm

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.