I am experimenting with Dialog at the moment and one of the small things that really annoy me is not being able to justify paragraphs in the source code automatically. The inform-mode for Emacs does this really well, and I want the same for Dialog.
Thus I have started working on an Emacs major mode for editing Dialog code. It’s not yet ready for public consumption, but I’m writing this to ask N things:
Is this something that would interest you?
Is this something that would interest you enough to contribute code to it?
Is this something that already exists and I’m reinventing the wheel?
I get that the intersection between Emacs users and IF authors that use Dialog is probably pretty small, but I’m still curious if it’s just me or at least one other person.
I don’t currently use Emacs, but my current source editor isn’t great for Dialog (I can’t see an outline of object and rule definitions to jump to for example), so if it’s good enough I could be convinced to switch!
I think Emacs already does that with outline-minor-mode. Setting outline-regexp to a good default would be low hanging fruit for a dialog-mode. I’ve just got it set to ”#”.
I did start one a couple of years ago but I haven’t looked at it much in the last year. It does include a partial parser and could re-indent the standard library without modifying the indentation, although I did find at least one place where the use of whitespace by convention was significant.
The git repository was never made public but I’ll attach a copy of what it looks like in its current state. I was originally planning to keep adding more tests and then go back and try to simplify/cleanup the parser code.
I think it is actually usable in its current state but I wouldn’t want to release it or endorse its use as it stands right now.