Ask HN: What code editors or IDEs are easily scriptable?

"I'd prefer to use an everyday-language I work in for scripting, which rules out Vimscript, Lua or Lisp."

Maybe if you’re a seasoned terminal veteran it will make more sense to you right outta the gate. I started using Kakoune not long after I started using the terminal much more heavily, so it was a bit difficult at first, but it has been and continues to be rewarding.

For example, select some text and press the pipe character, and then you can enter a script or shell command (sort, uniq, fmt, etc.). The selected text will be fed to stdin of the command, and then will be replaced with the output.

Combine this power with multiselections, which can be operated on in separate contexts, and you’ve got a stew going.

alright I'll put all the filenames in the buffer

    ls /tftp/bootroms/foobar/foobar_6.4_*.bin | gvim -

    :%!awk '{ printf("\%s\t", $0); system("strings " $0 " | grep '\''20[0-2][0-9],'\''") }'

    :1,$s:.*/::

    :%!sort -r -k4 -k2M -k3n -k5

    :set ts=16
    :set expandtab
    :retab

> Plain old vim

By this, do you mean this is only available in vim, not NeoVim?

I used just a little bit of code to make it so when I command-click a filepath anywhere, it opens in IntelliJ. This works in the browser, on chrome links, (github, gitlab, jenkins, error pages, etc) and also in iTerm on stack traces, spec/test paths. I made a chrome plugin, a shell script, and used the remote control plugin (not mine). The result was super-satisfying. I'll probably open source the bits soon. Now, I didn't script the IDE myself--the Remote Control Plugin did that work, but for an open source solution, I wouldn't mind building a remote control plugin myself.

Making this work got me wondering about doing the same with an open-source editor. I also would like to drive things internally, but I want it to be easy so I get a good return on the effort.

What I like about it is how it exposes pretty much all capabilities with no chance of breaking the editor host itself. Just the right balance of constrained-enough-but-seemingly-unconstrained.

You can develop these extensions in JS/TS super-smoothly inside VSC and run-with-F5 to open a new window with your extension running.

But frankly for small-script purposes, it's a bit overkill, unless/until you have enough of those that bundling them all up into one "my extension with all the Foos I demand" begins to make sense.

Unfortunately local-only, private one-off extensions aren't installed as trivially as dumping just-a-script-file in some dot folder and calling it done. I mean it almost is with `~/.vscode/extensions/my-ext/` but not 100% reliable. I have 2 custom exts in there that are always available but 1 that inexplicably never is (but builds & runs error/warning-free with F5). The official installation story is a "vsx package" (probably just a ZIP but haven't looked into it yet).

You can use Javascript, you don’t need to compile your scripts if you do you javascript, and you don’t need to restart the editor when you change your scripts. You do have to restart the extension host, but that’s not the same thing.