path: root/next-steps.txt

+ All syntatic choices must be centralized in single .zig file: keybindings, syntax for Look, etc; the motivation for this is that those can easilly be changed and tweaked if they're centralized like this and in the process we may cut down some repetition of logic.
+ Carve out and isolate the Output pane as its own semantic entity, right now we are doing specific stuff on the output pane based on the command that opened it, let's make this part of the data structure that represents it, the heuristics for special handling of the output panes will be done by reading the Command that originated it field from itself. Make this centralized on the code so its clear to see and tweak those heuristics.
- File panes need to split the latest column which a file pane was being used.
- Add multiple cursor support, and Ctrl-c auto comments. Use the same methodology of running helix in a harness as the oracle for differential testing. Also add regex interactive selection like on helix and the more specific selection semantics, use https://github.com/mnemnion/mvzr for regexes, add it using zig fetch.
- Add a new builtin that will list all builtins and their respective shortcuts if they have any (note that shortcuts may be spc+... or just keyboard or mouse chords/movements)
- Scrolling on a touchpad moves horizontally accidentally way too much, add some heuristics to prioritize vertical scrolling and make horizontal scrolling work only when the user is a bit more explicit about it - for example by measuring if there was recent high-enough vertical movement, etc.
- Add a new builtin to list the themes and create an output window to select those themes; each theme now must live on its own .zig file, when moving with n/N on out ThemeSel output window it will select that theme so it's a interactive way to select the themes. We're being clever now with how these output windows will work, this feature depends on the new semantics for output windows but basically now the ThemeSel output panes will set the Command flag that will basically tell that when doing n/N movement on the output pane instead of Look-ing it will Execute the line, so the ThemeSel output pane will be like: (Theme acme, Theme a, Theme b) seperated by lines so the n/N will automatically consider selecting the Theme + argument (this is not output pane specific, it should be generalized to work on every pane kind), and will Exec it. Add new themes that will be automatically exported from helix and zed, a new binary will execute that will generate .zig files, this binary will be added as a execute step on the build.zig so when building it will regenarate those .zig that will be then included on the runtime as themes.
- Use zig's 0.16 new threaded io and the std functions that the build system uses to listen for file changes, it needs to use something from the os so it's not a busy wait. It will only track files on open panes. when a file is updated, doing Undo will return to the state that it was before so if a file automatically updates the user won't lose the unsaved state as it was before and the editor won't need to handle with merging the unsaved changes and the new update.
- There's some bug when rendering from a ssh session - the screen gets dirty with old chars when scrolling.
- There's some bad performance when dealing with specially large files or long lines; write a perf harness for this and optimize the performance.
+ The Look and Exec should be regular semantic entities, i.e. their only special feature should be the keys/shortcuts they're assigned so we could execute Look main.zig and it would call the regular look on it, but also we could Look some string like @`ls -la` (you can change the syntax, but this also depends on that syntax change so it's centralized and easy to change later). This basically will allow you to make some big refactorings and cut a lot of code (hopefully) and also allow some funny things like @`Look .` (basically allowing nested things like this for no good reason other than, it's elegant and it's fun!) 
+ We'll make the focus history a meaningful and strong semantic entity: instead of being a stack of Panes, it'll be a stack of locations. This will allow us to implement vim's ctrl-i and ctrl-o that will just move the current focus up or down on that stack. there'll be also a new builtin that will toggle the focus of the latest panes, basically moving the current focus by changing the current pointer to the location on the stack. The Jumplist (new builtin) will be an Output pane with each line being a location that can be Looked, n/N should work.
+ The main pardes.zig file should hold the logic that applies to all kinds of panes and backends. Maybe right now the pane specifiticies are too intermingled. Maintain the panes logics into their own files, right now tty.zig exists but I don't think output panes live by themselves nor file panes on their own files. Also, each builtin command should be implemented as a struct, the current logic on switching on the enum should use some comptime logic to build the tagged union/enum from those structs now. Also I think it's time to create a few directories on @src now since some files are specific to some backends and others are part of the core, it should be clear just by looking at the directory structure (don't add more dir layers, just new  dirs under src).