Dot language support and better editor
jbriales opened this issue · 2 comments
Hi! First of all congrats on this project.
Some context
Let me quickly provide some context on my use case, as I think it may be representative of what potential GraphViz newcomers are and look for in this tool.
I'm starting to work with GraphViz to create simple diagrams (I wanted to have sth code-based vs purely graphical, i.e. sth more like Latex is to writing).
Anyway, GraphViz is exactly this and I've been willing to learn about it and work with it for a while.
Now, for someone starting with the language from scratch, I think it's really useful to have some GUI functionalities and widgets at hand. So kudos there to your project. It covers exactly this :)
In fact, I've done an as exhaustive as possible search through the internet for every possible existing GraphViz alternative and so far this is the only one which covers the GUI part. There seems to be DiagrammeR too, but I'm not fully sure what GraphViz flavor that uses, as it seems tightly integrated with R (which I'm not a user of).
Some improvement proposals
That said, I wanted to bring to your attention another tool I found in my search: Edotor. This integrates dot language support, thus editor autocompletion, etc. as well as the use of the monaco-editor (which felt really cool to me).
I'm afraid I'm not familiar with frontend developing and javascript but, I wonder how difficult it could be to integrate those two modules within your current app.
It would definitely make it top-notch, from the very beginner scale with GUI features to more advanced level with a more intensive use of the editor.
Looking forward to hearing your opinion about this.
Keep the hard work!
Thanks for the kind words and your enhancement proposal.
I'm reluctant to change the built-in editor from ACE to monaco-editor. Partly because a lot of code depends on the ACE API, but also because I think that most functions can be supported already with ACE, e.g. autocompletion.
The dot language support library might be useful.
If you can be a little more specific on which functions you consider most important other than autocompletion, I'll investigate if it's possible to implement them with ACE.
Closing due to inactivity.