I've been thinking about Potluck and the Emacs model of text augmented with attributes for ranges. Potluck describes 3 mechanisms: 1. extracting data using (regex) patterns 2. performing computations on that data 3. showing results of computation as annotations My notebook app does simple variants of 2 and 3, and replaces 1 with explicit in-document markup. Now I'm playing with another approach to 1. I already have the idea of pivots from my doodle app. Putting two of those pivots together should yield a range that adjusts in intuitive ways in the presence of edits. Think of a range as something like a hyperlink you add to a comment in a UI like this Slack app we're in right now: • Inserting/deleting text before a range moves it. • Inserting/deleting text after a range leaves it unchanged. • Inserting/deleting text within a range grows/shrinks it. • Deleting text at a boundary shrinks the range, and only deletes the attached attributes if the range becomes empty. This makes ranges more robust to deletion than my doodles attached to a single pivot. • Inserting text at boundaries can't always do what you want. I imagine it'd be nice to have handles that you can drag to adjust a range.

I think I’ll need to feel this to know what I think about it

Try it out, you mean? I'll send you something. Would you also like to try out the doodle app or notebook app I alluded to?