Back in the glory days of slub I used to live code with Perl, and wrote a text editor (also in Perl) for it called ‘feedback.pl’. It was a strange thing, where you wrote self-modifying code to store data in the sourcecode for the music you were writing, and therefore visualise it. I’ve been intending to make something similar for tidal for ages, and took some time to finally start work. I’ve experimented with a weird visual editor for tidal before, and have been fiddling around with a web-based editor as well, but this time decided to write something that worked in the terminal, using the fantastic ncurses framework. This is partly so it’ll run nicely on the Pi Zero, for my ongoing Spicule project, but partly because it just makes sense for a text editor to work in text mode, and it’s good to start from basics without taking on the many assumptions of an existing ‘general purpose’ text editor. I’m just seeing where it takes me but I’m pretty happy with it so far, it has some structured editing around patterns already, some ascii VU meters going on, and every edit is automatically recorded + timestamped. It’s far from being in a usable state, but here’s a quick demo:
You can find it on github but I’m not inviting patches until it’s a bit more fully formed.
