Extended Editor - display improvements

General discussions on potential enhancements to the APL+Win system.

Extended Editor - display improvements

Postby Davin Church » March 30th, 2014, 10:06 pm

I'd like to make some interface suggestions for the new extended-editor under development we saw demonstrated at the conference. Here's an extreme example to point out multiple ideas.

Example command (with pre-specified dimensions optionally selected):
Code: Select all
      )EDIT weird[2;1;↓;→;14]

Opens a window captioned with:
Code: Select all
      weird[2;1;↓;→;14]

which displays data like:
Code: Select all
        [;;;1;] [;;;2;] [;;;3;] [;;;4;] [;;;5;]
[;;1;;]       0       0       0 A       XYZ
[;;2;;]       0       0       0 A       XYZ
[;;3;;]       0       0       0 A       XYZ
[;;4;;]       0       0       0 A       XYZ
[;;5;;]       0       0       0 A       XYZ
[;;6;;]       0       0       0 A       XYZ
[;;7;;]       0       0       0 A       XYZ

For more brevity but less clarity, the ";"s could be eliminated from the row & column titles, though there would seldom be that many. (Perhaps they could be switched on and off?)
This design uses a maximum amount of screen space for editable data.

A "Change Slice" menu option (or double-clicking on the upper-left corner-header) would pop open a temporary window requesting a change in dimensions by using Spinner boxes in a traditional APL bracket-syntax-looking notation, such as:
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      [ 2⋄ ; 1⋄ ; ↓⋄ ; →⋄ ; 14⋄ ]
That's five edit boxes with attached spinners. The "[", "]", & ";" characters are constant decorations to help the programmer see what dimension they are choosing. The "⋄" represent up/down spinners to select appropriate indexes; "↓" and "→" are also spinner-selectable choices. The [optional] "↓" and "→" indicate the display dimension for that rank, so editing may be done on a "⍉" of the data if desired.

Using the "↓" indicator on a vector or on a single editable dimension of an array would indicate that the data is to be edited vertically rather than horizontally. This orientation could make certain kinds of data much easier to edit.

Does anyone have any comments, complaints, or further suggestions?
Davin Church
 
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Joined: February 24th, 2007, 1:46 am

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