Re: new package: sketch-mode

[Qiantan Hong <qhong@mit.edu>]

> I am writing primarily to notify you about a package, sketch-mode, I am working on. It provides a handy interface to quickly draw svg's using, well Emacs, but in particular svg.el and transient.el.
> It is handy in particular for creating svg sketches really fast, while of course, it has the advantage over other svg drawing applications that it is very hackable in your favorite langauge :)

This looks very exciting! Is the code available somewhere?

One important question I have is, do you implement it by putting an SVG overlay/property over a single dummy character,
or do you put it on a range of text that *semantically* correspond the SVG being displayed?
I strongly recommend the latter model because it makes it possible to blend in Emacs,
e.g. you can get cursor movement, selection, copy/yank etc relatively easily.
Just for a started, suppose underlying text is structured as one word correspond to and SVG element,
then one can use forward-word backward-word to move between elements.
And there’s much more to explore using other existing structural editing command.
On the other hand, overlaying over a single dummy character just sounds like inventing
a different, isolated editor emulated in Emacs.

I posted some more in-depth discussion over such issue here http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5630#comment-96710

If you find the above proposals compelling, I’m happy to collaborate on it if that’s helpful!
I once experimented building a music notation software using the above discipline
(character -> note head, word -> chord, sentence -> beamed note, paragraph -> bar)
but eventually I abandoned it and get away with MuseScore.

Best,
Qiantan