Slashdot Mirror
The Union of Vim with KDE
Philippe Fremy writes "Thomas Capricelli, Mickael Marchand and me are pleased to present the first ever stable version of KVim, finally bringing "the power of VIM with KDE's friendliness".
This release contains a port of the standalone editor Vim 6.0 to Qt/KDE (2 and 3) and a KDE KPart Component. The component can currently embed either of GVim or KVim in Konqueror (screenshots), with out-of-process embedding. Further work is required before proper support for KDevelop, KMail and Kate is available, but things are moving forward."
As everyone knows, Vim is the best (only?) text editor, and KDE is the best (only?)
desktop system. Heh.
Defies the whole persona of vim. vim loses what makes it useful when you stick it in a window and add menus and buttons.
vim is all about those wierd keystrokes you learn that funnily enough grow on you and multiply your productivity.
While I'm sure you can still do this with kvim, I don't see what would get a real vim user to use kvim rather than just vim in konsole.
Nice idea, like I said, but I don't expect too much takeup.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Since it's not in italic, chances are that this was CT's comment, and not the original article writers.
And while they wouldn't dance around a camp fire, the hate isn't exactly pretended either. KDE/Gnome has become one of the holy wars of computing: vi/emacs (go nano!!!), littleendian/bigendian, OOP, and many other venerable silly battles. It's actually an ideological battle - GNOME was started in the first place because KDE was based on Qt, which isn't GPL. Thus, the rush to create a GPL'd window/widget toolkit (GTK) and environment.
Well, it's been a high time to get real components on UNIX. Considering that UNIX (and Linux) are all about small tools doing their jobs and integrating with each other, components are logical extension of pipes... Now I just wish I had the time to start a project - I'd probably write component browser/method invoker module for zsh. :)
Anyway... kudos to VIM folks for getting this right.
--
I refuse to use
When I fell back into the Unix/Linux world some four years ago, my biggest crisis was finding a text editor. The obvious choice for me was Vi in a term window (I've been using Vi since Jimmy was president). Alas using it in a windowing environment presented special problems. The big one is that I kept forgetting which mode I was in. Maybe you can have a half-dozen windows open and keep a state diagram of every one in your head. I can't. I needed an editor that was stateless, or at least less stateful than vi(m)-in-a-window.
Lucky for me, this was right when the Vim people perfected GVim, a version that integrated itself with various windowed environment. A paste is a paste, never mind what mode you're in. That by itself was enough for me to send a check to Bram's orphans. (I assume everybody else has?) The rest -- macros, synax colors, incremental search, being able to use the same editor on different platforms -- was just gravy.
So we've actual had this personna-defying version of Vim for quite some time. The Linux port uses GNOME widgets, but runs under KDE, no problem.
Also, you shouldn't assume that Vim is strictly for keep-my-hands-on-the-keyboard geeks. I know people who are put off by the weird modal keystrokes that Vim inherited from Vi. But they use Vim anyway, because it's the best comprimise available between power and functionality. Most editors are either to limited (KEdit) or infected with Feature Elephantitis (EMACS). Vim strikes a nice balance.