The Awesome Factor

To edit a word in Factor you pass the edit word a defspec, like \ + edit or { float + } edit, or you press CTRL-SHIFT-E on a word. If an editor path is already set, then the word definition should pop up in your editor at the line of the definition. However, if you haven’t configured your text editor, a restart will be thrown and you can select it from a list. If you selected gvim, previously it would use a braindead algorithm that makes a list of all paths in \Program Files and then traverses that list looking for the gvim.exe binary. This caused it to hang while doing tons of disk IO.

Now it’s better in two ways – it only looks in \Program Files\vim\ (oops), and secondly you can search with find-file-breadth or find-file-depth. The implementation is pretty simple – breadth first search uses a dlist, pushes the new traversal results to the back of the list, and traverses the list in order. Depth first also pushes newly found directories to the end of the list, but it pops them from the end.

The next step is to extract out the depth/breadth first algorithm so it’s generally useful, but I need to continue working on the database library.