From: Alexander Kellett <ruby-lists@...>
Date: 2004-08-14T18:26:08+09:00
Subject: Re: About ruvi

On Sat, Aug 14, 2004 at 03:19:54PM +0900, Gavin Sinclair wrote:
> >> 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?

the interactive functionality that i think is 
irreplacable. i refuse to implement anything that
could be implemented faster on the command line with
a line of ruby code basically. iow. non of the more
complex ed. just interactive functionality.

> 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.

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'm not sure what version your using exactly... w/b wrap
the document on purpose. :set works. search and replace i 
find stupid anyway. undo broken? no recovery? what sort of
broken ruby implementation are you running it with? :P gg 
works dd works t and f i find unimportant. in what case is 
p broken? no command line really so why have a command line 
history?  :P macros are in latest .11 version as i said in 
the email starting this thread... anyways. all trivial stuff.

> 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.

total disagreement, but then thats logical really given
that i started and its as good as complete...

> 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.

free speech... its just not useful enough. just like i
would say perl is a useless pile of crud. vimscript is
a useless pile of crud. :)

> And then a new editor written in that language :)

:P

> 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.
> :)

still don't find it a bold claim...
would "best editor ever written with vi/vim bindings subset"
make you happier? :P

> 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?

sure i'll look into seperating it out.

Alex