Lapis (text editor)
| Company type | Free software |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software, Web browser, Text editor |
| Headquarters | Cambridge , United States |
| Products | Web browser, Text editor |
| Owner | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) |
Lapis represents an innovative web browser and text editor designed to facilitate simultaneous editing across multiple text selections. It employs a technique called selection guessing, a variant of programming by example, which automatically deduces the intended selections by analyzing both positive and negative user inputs. This capability distinguishes it from typical text editors, although it shares similarities with certain web scraper and data munging applications.
The selection process in Lapis involves generating features to identify key attributes, recognizing shared characteristics, formulating hypotheses to encapsulate the selection criteria, and then applying these rules throughout the document. Additionally, it incorporates outlier detection mechanisms that flag elements with low conformity scores, allowing users to verify or adjust these exceptions.
Lapis supports editing of structured markup languages such as HTML by utilizing a predefined template vocabulary. It also offers a WYSIWYG browser interface that enables users to perform multiple simultaneous modifications on web pages by targeting corresponding HTML tags beneath the surface.
Primarily developed in Java at MIT, Lapis is released under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2), while some of its components rely on other licensing arrangements.
See also
References
- LAPIS: Smart Editing with Text Structure, introductory article.
- Lightweight Structured Text Processing, extended description.
- Multiple selections in smart text editing (@ CiteseerX), Robert C. Miller, Brad A. Myers. Proceedings of the 2002 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, ACM, 2002: describes how multiple selections automate repetitive text editing and introduces selection guessing.
- Toolkits for Generating Wrappers by Stefan Kuhlins, Ross Tredwell.
- Entity quick click: rapid text copying based on automatic entity extraction by Eric A. Bier, Edward W. Isha.
- Copy-and-Paste between Overlapping Windows by Olivier Chapuis, Nicolas Roussel, Proceedings of CHI'07: discusses fast copy-paste of multiple selections or text entities like phone numbers.