#211 Integration with external code editor

[Anonymous]

After using QM frequently for the past year the biggest annoyance I face is the lack of traditional code editor features. I don't spend much time writing code in the file editor as I mostly view the files as locations to hold the generation directives. However, when writing code in the property editor for for state machines or operations I find the lack of completion, hints, errors and warnings as a burden. I understand that to provide these traditional code editor features would require a language server among other QM development to drive these features and this may be a large task to integrate third party tools like language servers.

Given this hurdle, I am curious about the possibility of integrating a third party editor. The way I envision this working right now is when I am in the property editor and want to add code, I can either use a hot key or click a button to open a custom editor of choice to edit this code section. I use NeoVim for coding so this would immediately provide integration with a language server making it such that I can reference other functions and data in the rest of my project that is external to QM and see if I create any errors or warnings when editing the code section. Even more so, I get the syntax highlighting that I am accustomed to automatically.

A couple of quick ideas of how this might be able to work is using a plain text file as a "communication" object between the external editor and QM.

When the code in the external editor is written it writes to a file that QM passed as an argument to the editor when it opened it. QM is then able to read this file and transfer the text into its model file.

I hope this long post makes sense as I can be a rambler but I feel very confident that a feature like this could significantly improve the QM workflow for many people.