lichtkind

Juhuu, released Kephra 0.401 in the spirit release early - release often. It is the start of a complete rewrite. So it's back to zero: now it can only edit one file at a time and has only Perl highlighting and UTF-8 or ASCII encoding. But some of you will still want to use it (beside vi, emacs, VStudio or atom - I know) because of the comfort in basic editing it provides. The following article explains what I mean by that.

Basic editing means writing, crafting, forming a text without big IDE features like refactoring, linting and such. It is surprising how deficient, especially big IDE are in that field, where a little coding and much attention to details works wonders.

It starts with tiny things like: in Perl $ @ % are word character because part of an identifier. And when you navigate the next you want skip a whole var at once or select it, without additional key twiddling. You want also navigate between matching braces, from block to block or from sub so sub or just easily return to place you just wrote something (Ctrl+E).
All that by just holding Ctrl for minimal finger movement.

Speaking of selecting. Sometimes its not even needed, because many functions like copy take in Kephra the current line if nothing is selected instead of doing nothing (what a waste of key mapping space). But if you want to select something, just press Ctrl+A. The selection will grow from word to line to block to document. But while doing that it will also select quoted strings, expressions or loops. You know all the hassle and navigation just to select something specific to copy paste and adapt indention. Why not right away move a block with the cursor keys (including page up and page down) and while on it adjust indention with left and right.

When putting something in quotes or braces: why not select first and write the first brace char. Auto-indention, brace highlight including brace bad light for braces without partner. Easily duplicate lines or words, but that's pretty standard nowadays. rectangular editing. Smart commenting of blocks that is immune to regular commenting. Such things add up and when combined and used strategically - programming becomes a lot faster.

Then we have a full featured search bar that expands to a replace bar (never hides any document text). It has some nice extras, including navigating the finds with up and down (as one more option). But if you prefer you can do almost all his functionality without entering the bar. F3 just hops to the next occurrence of the selected text.

And the cherry on top : talk to me - maybe it can implemented in several minutes or hack you favorite featureit yourself in Perl and make a pull request.