SMARTedit is a text editor that lets you program text-editing macros by demonstration. SMARTedit stands for Simple MAcro-Recognition Tool editor.
Macros in ordinary text editors, such as emacs, are difficult to use: they're tricky to get right the first time, hard to debug and visualize, and brittle (they don't always work on new cases).
On the other hand, people faced with repetitive text-editing tasks badly need a way to construct simple programs to automate parts of their work. Yet as soon as the tasks get more complicated than simple search-and-replace, the poor user is faced with learning a programming language such as Visual Basic in order to control the application.
SMARTedit addresses these problems by using robust machine learning technology to allow non-programmers to construct complex text-editing programs without writing a single piece of code, simply by interacting directly with the interface. SMARTedit learns programs in a simple yet expressive programming language with constructs such as "move to the beginning of the string tag" and "insert the string <B>".
Walk through an illustrative session with SMARTedit as we teach it how to delete HTML comments from a text file.
SMARTedit is written entirely in Python. It requires Python 1.5.2 or greater, Tcl/Tk 8.0 or greater, and Pmw (Python MegaWidgets).
SMARTedit is no longer under active development, but you are welcome to get the code and try it out.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]