Path to extending Lyx to a full featured Jupyter-like IDE

[Allen Barker]

On 6/25/19 12:42 PM, Richard Kimberly Heck wrote:
> Thanks for these ideas. I'm not an R user myself, though, so it would be
> helpful to me if you could explain what it is you are trying to achieve.
> It's best when thinking through issues like this one to separate the
> problem from the solution. What's below seems to be a mix between those.
> 
> One reason I ask about this is that LyX 2.3.3 has added the ability to
> edit the LaTeX preamble or the contents of an ERT inset using some
> external editor. LyX 2.4.0 will extend that to 'collapsible' insets
> generally, controlled by a layout tag EditExternal. So by activating
> this tag for the appropriate kind of inset, you can edit its contents in
> whatever editor you define for its format. That seems, if I'm reading
> you right, to give you much of what you want---and to use your editor of
> choice.

I'm very interested to hear about the new 2.4.0 editable insets.  As I
mentioned in my other recent posting in a related thread, I ran into this
same problem a few years back when I implemented my Lyx Notebook project.
I had to resort to an ugly kludge to get the inset text.

Is this new feature already implemented in the 2.4.0 code in the git
repo?  Does it work for Flex insets, too?  If so, how do you enable it
for a Flex inset?

I assume this uses the inset-edit LFUN, which opens an editor on the
text.  I'm not sure how to set the particular editor to use, though.

It would be nice to have an option to have the LFUN just return the
filename rather than running an editor process on the file.
Sometimes users might want to edit the inset text and sometimes you
might want to process the text with your already-running program
(Lyx Notebook uses Lyx server pipes).

I also had a few other wish-list LFUNs from back when I implemented
that program (such as "goto the next inset of a given type").  Perhaps
I'll post them for discussion in a new thread at some point.  There
might already be ways to do some of them.