Our paper with Eugene Syriani, Daniel Riegelhaupt and Bruno Barroca on the Generation of Custom Textual Model Editors has been published in the Modelling journal of MDPI. (Available via Open Access.)
Textual editors are omnipresent in nowadays’ software tools. Editors provide basic features, such as copy-pasting and searching, or more advanced features, such as error checking and text completion. Current technologies in model-driven engineering can automatically generate textual editors to manipulate domain-specific languages (DSLs). However, the customization and addition of new features to these editors is often limited to changing the internal structure and behavior. In this paper, we explore a new generation of self-descriptive textual editors for DSLs, allowing full configuration of their structure and behavior in a convenient formalism, rather than in source code. We demonstrate the feasibility of the approach by providing a prototype implementation and applying it in two domain-specific modeling scenarios, including one in architecture modeling.