special editor support for indentation needed.

[Eric S. Johansson]

in trying to make programming in Python more accessible to disabled programmers
(specifically mobility impaired speech recognition users), and hitting a bit of
a wall. The wall (for today) is indentation. I need a method of getting the
"right indentation" without having to speak a bunch of unnecessary commands.
For example, depth specified by the previous line. But, frequently you need to
go to a more arbitrary indentation for example the right level of indentation
for a method definition or class definition. This indentation should be
something you could get by typing/speaking the right command with your eyes closed.

For example if I was to give the command "new method", I should be able to spit
out a template (contained within the speech recognition environment) and through
a command embedded in the template, force indentation to the right level for
"def" and then the editor would control indentation for the rest of the text
injection.

I prefer are working in Emacs because that's where I have a lot of my speech
grammars set up but I'm not averse to trying another editor. The only condition
is that the editor must run a Windows and have remote editing mode (like tramp)
so I can edit on remote machines.

ideas?

 

[Matimus]

in trying to make programming in Python more accessible to disabled programmers
(specifically mobility impaired speech recognition users), and hitting a bit of
a wall.  The wall (for today) is indentation.  I need a method of getting the
"right indentation" without having to speak a bunch of unnecessary commands.
For example, depth specified by the previous line.  But, frequently you need to
go to a more arbitrary indentation for example the right level of indentation
for a method definition or class definition.  This indentation should be
something you could get by typing/speaking the right command with your eyes closed.

For example if I was to give the command "new method", I should be able to spit
out a template (contained within the speech recognition environment) and through
a command embedded in the template, force indentation to the right level for
"def" and then the editor would control indentation for the rest of the text
injection.

I prefer are working in Emacs because that's where I have a lot of my speech
grammars set up but I'm not averse to trying another editor.  The only condition
is that the editor must run a Windows and have remote editing mode (like tramp)
so I can edit on remote machines.

ideas?

You could make use of something like 'pindent.py' (comes with python
in windows under the \Python2x\Tools\Scripts folder). Which allows you
to put in block delimiters as comments, and then fixes the code to
align itself correctly to those blocks:

def foobar(a, b):
if a == b:
a = a+1
elif a < b:
b = b-1
if b > a: a = a-1
# end if
else:
print 'oops!'
# end if
# end def foobar

Funny though. I always saw this tool as a sort of joke response to
people who missed their block delimiters. "You want block delimiters?
Use this." And see how long before they decide it is silly.

Matt