Lapis (text editor)

Lapis is an experimental text editor allowing multiple simultaneous edits of text in a multiple selection.

Lapis is an instance of Programming by example. The multiple items to edit are selected automatically according to the example provided by the user, making this experimental feature unique to Lapis among text editors.

The process to create the selecion is based on a formal concept analysis that determines the more salient properties of the items selected by the user, and then applies the generalized concept to the wole text. Lapis also features outliers detection, marking in red those items selected that have a low matching score, thus allowing the user to review the automatic decisions made by the algorithm.

Lapis includes a templates vocabulary to assist editing several kinds of structured languages. One of those languages is HTML. Lapis includes a Web browser view that allows its multiple edit feature to work on web pages in a WYSIWYG way, through automatic matching of the underlying HTML tags.

References

• Citeseer
• LAPIS: Smart Editing with Text Structure introductory article.
• Lightweight Structured Text Processing, an extended description
• Robert C. Miller, Brad A. Myers: Multiple selections in smart text editing. 103-110, IUI 2002, Proceedings of the 2002 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, January 13–16, 2002, San Francisco, California, USA. ACM, 2002, ISBN 1-58113-459-2
• Toolkits for Generating Wrappers by Stefan Kuhlins, Ross Tredwell
• Entity quick click: rapid text copying based on automatic entity extraction by Eric A. Bier, Edward W. Isha. Abstracts of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• Copy-and-Paste between Overlapping Windows by Olivier Chapuis, Nicolas Roussel. In Proceedings of CHI'07. "Other systems have been proposed to support fast copy-paste of multiple selections or text entities like phone numbers"

See also

• multi edit, a plugin for the gedit editor