thinking about editing interfaces for 2d grids of text.
i like the "editor-agnostic" property of text. however, with 2d grids, i want to be able to edit columns and sub-grids with the same affordances i can edit rows.
if i were more of a vim hacker this seems like it'd be doable. probably with an emacs mode too? no idea about lsp. (i feel like at minimum a claim to "editor agnosticism" needs to work with those 3 things.)
...oh no, this is a "spreadsheets as programming language" problem isn't it
the other side of this is parsing i guess. i want to be able to write something whose ast is a(b1(c1, c2, c3), b2(c4, c5)) as, say,
```
a > b1 > c1 | b2 > c4
> c2 | > c5
> c3 |
```
(the delimiters are because ideally i want to avoid whitespace sensitivity in parsing...)
the inspiration for this is the grid-based pattern-rewriting language i've been collaborating on with some games people (play around with it at https://crowdgames.github.io/trrbt/edengine.html !). the first image is the visual syntax in our web-based editor vs. some speculative text-based syntax for the 2d parts
@chrisamaphone [galaxy brain glowing] text editors, spreadsheets, and RPGMaker are all simply different types of tile editor
@jplebreton @chrisamaphone and now with a @roguelike_con talk about a word-processor roguelike, i want to make a spreadsheet one, hahahaha. thank you for this ^_^
Oct 18, 2026, 4:52 PM@chrisamaphone emacs has a picture mode that's usable for ascii art
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Picture-Mode.html