Dear monks, I would like to write a GUI for editing two parallel texts. Essentially, what's needed is a scrollable two-column spreadsheet where the user can split and merge cells to bring the two texts in sync. Doing this in a spreadsheet program with copy-pasting is pretty slow and inconvenient, so I would like to have a specialized ui that has buttons and/or keyboard shortcuts for split and merge.
Tk::TableMatrix or Tk::TableMatrix::Spreadsheet seem like a good place to start, but obviously neither has merge/split facilities. How difficult would it be to add that? Basically I would need one shortcut that merges the active/selected cell with the next, shifting the rest of the column up a cell, and a shortcut that splits the current cell at the cursor location and pushes the rest of the column down a cell.
I have read some of the documentation for Tk::TableMatrix, and it seems it can just load hashes or arrays into a spreadsheet and automatically save the changes back to the hash or array, which would suit my purposes pretty well. All I would need is these two extra features. Mind you, I'm a novice perl programmer and I don't know anything about these modules in particular.

So, my question is: is this something a novice coder could get done in a couple of days, and how would one go about it? Also, would performance be a problem if there are a couple of thousand records in the table, each with 2x100 characters of text? I imagine not, as the data isn't that much, but who knows how efficient Tk::TableMatrix is.

In reply to Extensibility of Tk::TableMatrix by elef

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