From: Iain 'Spoon' Truskett <spoon@...>
Date: 2002-12-12T10:10:10+09:00
Subject: Re: The coolest thing since sliced bread

* MikkelFJ (mikkelfj-anti-spam@bigfoot.com) [12 Dec 2002 11:43]:
> "Iain 'Spoon' Truskett" <spoon@dellah.org> wrote:
> > There's more to Vim than just the key bindings. [...] Just as
> > there's more to emacs than its key bindings.

> You forget you have Ruby on taps.

And emacs has lisp on tap =) [and vim has its viml, but I'm not a fan of
viml, which is why it's good vim lets one have ruby and perl built in]

> "Simple" editors such as Scite are critized for not being powerful
> enough - but fact is the standard key bindings does 99% of the job
> easier than emacs and vim (I really did try to give each of these a
> go).

Editors are personal things =)

I'd love to test Scite, but it appears to be Win/X based rather than
xterm/console.

Any editor that is programmable is powerful enough.

> The rest is advanced functionality which isn't really about editing.
> You can write plugins in FreeRide to accoplishing any number of such
> tasks - its far more powerful than vim or emacs which are also a kind
> of GUI framework and editor.

Well, it is meant to be an IDE tailored for Ruby. v/e are generic
editors. I get to edit any sort of file. I'm not saying I'm against
IDEs, just that I favour consistency between editing different types of
files. Once one learns an editor and has used it for some time one
becomes used to its quirks. The number of times I've pressed Esc while
entering form data on a web page and thus succeeded in wiping what I've
just written is ridiculous (thus w3m and Webite get points for having
textareas edited in one's $EDITOR).

> It's always annoyning when keybindings are different for standard
> navigation, and for those not customed with ctrl+x etc. for copy paste
> etc.  different bindings would be nice.

Not just standard navigation, but routine tasks. Someone used to vi(m)
expects modal editing. They expect the : command line, and for the
commands one is used to to work. A transition to a 'better' way is fine,
but an abrupt switch could be painful.

> But auto-formatting, ftp, bookmarks etc. could well be jobs for new
> plugins.

Yes. I can't say I use my editor for ftp, but then I don't edit remote
files except via ssh+vim =)

[...]
> Of course, the benefits of vim and emacs is the existing modules - but
> then we a lot of Ruby modules to pull on. Thus I advise to view
> FreeRide as an entirely new editor, not a GUI that should accomodate
> all kinds of editors.

Which is where it loses, imho. And where most IDEs have lost me before.
I edit more than just Ruby. That said, I'll take a look at what FreeRide
offers (when 0.5.0 is released) and see what I can nab for vim plugins.

> That said, you could probably create connections to external editors
> by writing a FreeRide communiction plugin in vim and emacs.

Good.


cheers,
-- 
Iain.