Excerpts from ale rimoldi's message of Tue Sep 23 18:03:45 +0000 2014:
> on top of that, while i never had a look at the vim source code, i've
> read scaring tales about it.
Some cases where the vim source code appears very hacky to me:
http://vim-wiki.mawercer.de/wiki/topic/in-which-way-does-vim-suck.html
Rewriting an editor? Have a a look at existing solutions
- neovim
- jedit (java editor, no vi keybindings, but you could look at its
history to understand the effort it takes to write an editor)
- ...
Idea/Eclipse/Netbeans all offer Vi Keybindings (maybe extra plugin)
Just to get an idea about how much work it is (just have a look at the
history).
If to rewrite, using what language? C++? Sucks - gtk&gimp/suckless/ more
teams (jackaudio) cannot decide which language to use. They end up with:
"Hey, we have two versions now: one written in C having features A, and
one in C++ having B".
That's why I concluded that I had to write a new language first. Where
to start? Have a look at impredicative.com/ur, Disciple (strict Haskell
dialect, memory regions and such), or rust (Mozilla is writing a multi
core web engine using that) ?
That's why I didn't start a project such as neovim yet.
Also keep in mind that even Emacs has a Vim emulation
http://www.emacswiki.org/Evil
There is also "yi" written in Haskell which offers Vim and Emacs like
keybinding flavours.
And there is a lot more around (editors written ruby on github and
whatnot). What makes Vim still productive, even though it has many
flaws? Its community. An editor without a community is worthless.
> and while testing vis, i started fearing that each of the many heavy
> users out there uses a different small subset of all the vim goodness:
> this could explain, why it's so bloated. let's hope that it's not
> true.
It totally is. Its vim, its the mailinglist, its the "plugin X which
provides feature Y" - I tried switching to Emacs once, but gave up after
2 weeks. Too much code to rewrite.
Thus before rewriting from scratch find out what you really want and
where to start - and make sure you have either funding or enough "money"
for living first .. ^^
That's my view.
Marc Weber
Received on Wed Sep 24 2014 - 10:50:35 CEST