From: Gavin Sinclair Date: 2004-08-14T15:19:54+09:00 Subject: Re: About ruvi On Friday, August 13, 2004, 6:17:10 PM, Alexander wrote: > On Fri, Aug 13, 2004 at 02:52:16PM +0900, Gavin Sinclair wrote: >> What's the motivation behind ruvi? Your web page (last I looked) was a >> bit bare in this department. > thanks for bringing this up. > yeah the webpage is extremely bare i'd prefer to use the > rubyforge wiki honestly so i'll try and fill it in in the > coming weeks and also provide some easy to find links to it :) Excellent. >> If you're cloning vim as much as possible, and not adding other features, >> why would a person use ruvi instead of vim? (Is it the speed? ;P) > its the 'other features' in the base distro, catering particulary > to ruby users that is the idea behind ruvi. be it well thought out > irb / ri integration, or ide like capabilities, i won't say no to > the addition of a plugin as long as its maintainable :) What percentage of vim's functionality do you think you've covered? And how much do you plan to cover? >> If, as I suspect, ruvi will contain the excellent feature of Ruby >> scriptability, I believe the greater outcome would be to patch Vim for >> this feature[1]. Bram would be interested, wouldn't he? That way, we >> could benefit from Vim's general excellence and years of development, plus >> all the existing Vim scripts. > vim's code base from what i recall is awful. That I find surprising, given how well it appears to be managed. > it has taken me less time to hack a fairly feature complete > clone than it would take me to wrap everything in vim. I'm sceptical that it's possible for you to create a "fairly feature complete clone". Not based on your ability, of course; just on the sheer size of vim :) Perhaps you underestimate this. Perhaps you don't care. For example, my attempt just then to write a file /tmp/xyz resulted in an exception. There appears to be no recovery mechanism. After starting afresh, I discover there's no macros, no command-line history, not even a "set" command, no :normal, no :help, not even search and replace! Undo is broken, 'gg' doesn't do anything, neither does 'dd', 't', 'f', ... 'w' and 'b' wrap the document, 'p' doesn't place the cursor correctly, 'C' is buggy. I would go on but it just crashed for the 5th time because I pressed the down arrow. (Funny, it liked the down arrow a second ago.) I point these out not to complain or any such thing (lest dross order me to send patches or some such dross); rather to suggest that all the fixing and implementing required to get it anywhere near vim will require lots of time, and most importantly motivation. I'm confident that wrapping vim would start to look easier. > vimscript is the native scripting platform and even that > is far from useful. It's an awful scripting language, but people have used it to create powerful features, like remote editing (over FTP/SSH, etc.) and text alignment. So long as someone else is writing it, it's great! Given this, you shouldn't say it's not useful. >> If, as is another strong possibility, you're one of those people who just >> has to write a text editor at some point in your life, good luck to you :) >> It's an interesting project to inspect, even if I don't really use it. > first a text editor. next on my list is a programming language :) And then a new editor written in that language :) Seriously, though; a text editor extensible in Ruby is a great thing, so I don't care if you drop the whole "vim clone". Should you ever need reminding what a bold claim that is, though, just drop me a line. :) Gavin P.S. I'd *really* *really* *really* like for you to place the indentation code into a separate library that could be reused by other editors (typically as an external command). Any chance of that?