general customize-like data editor?

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

Several times[1] I've wished for a general data editor.

It would behave like Customize but at the data level. The closest I've
found is `eieio-customize-object' from eieio-custom.el. The EIEIO
facilities make a lot of sense for this, and I don't think it's a big
burden for packages to map their *editable* structures to defclasses,
even if they don't buy into it generally.

So my questions are:

1) are there non-EIEIO field editors, based on alists or plists when you
don't know all the fields in advance, but can specify their type? The
use case here is "I have a data structure with integer keys x, y, z; all
the rest should default to string editing."

2) inside Emacs, `eieio-customize-object' is only used by CEDET. Are
there other packages that use it? Any experiences, positive or negative?

3) currently `eieio-customize-object' is focused on editing a single
object. Are there table editors that would allow changing multiple
objects? For instance the process environment editor in
https://github.com/dgtized/list-environment.el could use that. The
use case here is "I have a data structure with a list of strings I'd
like to edit."

Clearly this parallels the Customize interface, which knows how to
validate and edit things like '(repeat string) etc. so if there are ways
to simply use that interface, that's probably easiest. But that doesn't
solve editing multiples as in (3) and seems to have a lot of hard-coded
behavior specific to customizing named variables. So I'm not sure what
to do.

Thanks
Ted


[1] https://github.com/vmware/govmomi/issues/646 and https://github.com/dgtized/list-environment.el/issues/2 for instance