lichtkind

Mark eting may prefer vampires, but here's a different why Kephra keeps evolving, for all that are interested in dev tools, written in Perl. Oh , btw, it go ready on CPAN day - mere coincidence. :)

Short recap: Kephra started out as my personal editor written in WxPerl. Some more people liked it too, its on debian, CPAN, sourceforge, softpedia, etc. and sometimes I get mail because of that, which I enjoy. However, the advent of other things and moreover the architecture that could not sustain features I wanted made me think. So I started an ambitious rewrite called KephraXP.

That halted as I started my new university study but I'm back on the track. In fact the real takeaway message is here I completed the ded prototype in 2 days. But what is ded? I'm so glad you asked.

As our field (as every industry) is riddled with so much hype BS I had a growing dis-ease with all this agile, hyperXP stuff. So I wrote down what I thought as sane dev method and called in CP (complete programming). Some of it was practice proven, but some of it was mere speculation. So I had to do a complete dogfeeding to check its practicability. Allright - I spare you the long explanation of CP but one pillar are two types of prototypes. Some to check if a technology provides crucial features you need for the project and one type to explore feature sets that belong together from the architectural sense (and most of the time also from users point of view).

The first of these prototypes i called sed (simple editor) is what you need to edit a perl file: Open, Save, Close, Highlighting, and not breaking your encoding. The second: ded (or document editor) could - hold your seats- could handle several documents at once. I know very exciting feature. Buts is enabled my an rather nicely desinged and powerful doc stash module and a rather oo view on docs (a part were it makes sense). To carve out all that (even if massively using prior art) in two days I don't find too shabby.

One point that helps me is also because i have now prototype I can use hi to write on the next to further motivate progress. ultimately the direction I'm heading is not what you traditionally call Editor not IDE. Yes lightweight as an editor, but with some of the powerful editing functions you see rather seldom in IDE and also some niceness IDE have rather that Editors. But fankly programming is a little bit more that having good overview over code, being able to refactor and other advanced text transformations. You all the time look into docs, have your code snippets you reuse or stuff from other projects - in short a lot of information management is going on. And the fundamental problems are IMO not really adressed. So I let it for now stand as an appetizer, but I'm planing something here - BTW my bachelor work is also in that field where I work with the needs of linguists and according fields, but its also text based information management.

cheers :)