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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.
On a serious note, it shows that we can do things under linux that happen in Windows; the OLE model in Windows has allowed things like this for years, and it's about time we had a similar model in the *nix world.
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.
this would have been a great april fools joke. Kvim could include an add on module called kflame that automaticaly generates flaming posts. this would force Gvim to release Gflame. these would be followed by Kextinguish and Gwiz. oh please let it end!
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.
Maybe Bill Gates, with his vi background, will consider using KDE in windows 2004... :)
-- No sig today
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
Ah! The acid test for KDE - can it make vi usable for non unix-gurus?
...
Given that there is now a version of Vim for both Gnome & KDE, does it make sense for (X)Emacs to make the jump too? I know the origins of Xemacs are as much political as technical - but does it not make sense to try to branch off 2 versions of emacs into the 2 guis?
I started out making a joke post, but the more I think of it, the cooler i think Kemacs would be
Vim is scriptable.
You can implement almost ANY function in Vim provided that it can be invoked from a shell. And with the powerful shell of linux, you can almost add any kind of "tricks up its sleeve" to Vim easily.
Remember the UNIX philosophy of everything being small and doing just its own job?
Don't quote me on this.
Well it looks like we Slashdotted it already.
....karma whore :0p
As usual you can view using the trusty Google cache by clicking here.
Yeah I know I know
Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?
First off, let me say that I actually use Emacs so I'm not (totally) just flaming.
/. article that talked about whether there was really an advantage to this, but every time I have to reach 20cm over to the mouse I want to throw a book at the screen. Call me lazy... here ends the rant :)
I used VI for years, but this is 2002, the year in which we can buy a tiny mobile phone which can be used to watch a movie on it or browse websites
If I was typing on a mobile phone, I'd certainly want the automagical smart typing to allow me to type more than 1/2 word per minute. But here in 2002, computers still use keyboards, and on a keyboard I can type ~90 WPM without the help of "smart" editing.
In fact, and I do know this for a fact, smart editing actually *slows* me down. Every time the computer doesn't do what I want it to do and I have to press "Control-Z" and undo all of its "smart" capitalization, punctuation, spelling, bold-ifying, paragraph-making mistakes, I *lose* productivity. That's why when I want to type a document in an office suite (pick your choice), I generally turn off almost all of the "smart" features. It's also why I don't use Word, not because it's M$, but because it tries to do everything I don't want it to, and the damn clippy won't go away.
Granted, if you don't type 90 WPM, it might help to have it do some stuff for you. Even better (worse?), if you are like my grandma and don't know how to use the arrow keys or "Control-Z", some smart editing might make it faster to fix your little capitalization mistakes.
And in response to the first part of your comment, as you know, most people who use VI, Emacs, or other "antiquated" editors spend most of their time writing code. What happens when the computer thinks it knows what you are trying to code? It guesses the name of your method call or variable incorrectly and you end up with big nasty bugs. Bugs that are worse than a simple human spelling error because the name is actually valid and the compiler doesn't catch it. I would throw a fit if my IDE tried to do anything more invasive than doing partial-autocomplete in my method names (which Emacs and VI both can do when configured properly, IIRC (depending on the language)).
Not to mention that Emacs and VI are the only "real" editors that let me do *everything* without ever taking my hands off the keyboard. I remember a recent
This post has been brought to you by the Letter K and the letter V, and the number 3.
Code softly but carry a big magnet.
Does Vim support '%' on #if/#else/#endif yet? That's one of the things that stops me from switching from Elvis.
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
ZZ saves you two keys.
And both save you from touching the file if you didn't make any changes.
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
Why didn't Mr. Taco just say "in the red corner, VI and KDE, in the blue corner EMACS and GNOME, this is the MOTHER of all flamewars! FIGHT!"
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Lets look at this from the other side, the emacs side. With emacs you can have a browser in your editor. While you are at it you can have your shell and tetris and mail, news and and and. I am not here to expose the virtue of emacs but to instead ask why this took so long and what real bennies this will have. I can more than see the good of vi embeded with kdevelop but I would much rather use emacs as my IDE for its stablity reasons. Even if emacs was embeded in konq I would still rather use emacs by its self because konq has a habit of crashing on anything less that 128 meg of real memory. Why dont the vim developers work on makeing a vim with an IDE rather than having other work on embeding vim in other apps?
Karma goes down by several points for unpopular oppinion.
Ascii artist &
Easy to use Vim? Don't you mean Cream?
</shameless plug>There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
http://www.darryl.com/vi.shtml
There's a similar project for GNOME, called Gnome-vim (screenshot). AFAIK, it is only useable with Evolution.
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.
I'm highly suspicious of this "integration" process. This uncessary addition of vim into KDE will deprive consumers of real choice, potentially leading to a stranglehold in the up-and-coming field of text editors. Will retailers have the option of replacing Kvim with a component of their own choosing? What will happen to the Kemacs, Kpico, and the just-started Ked projects? I've read before that KDE has not been developed with modularity in mind, making Kvim's removal impractical at best, so we may be witnessing a thinly-veiled attempt by KDE to subsume the entire editor market. Before we jump on the bandwagon here expousing the virtues of this marriage, we should take a lesson from history and recognize the many subtle consequences of this action.
Now how long until we get KDE for Emacs?
I think we're going to witness the developmental evolution of KDE application naming.
Simply prefixing the program with the letter 'k' is not enough, as those lamers developers over at Gnome can simply take the same program, s/qt/gtk+/g, and s/^k/g/g. How's a KDE developer to cope?
Here's an idea: Give all KDE apps girl's names. We have Kate; now all we need is Kim, Kamilla, Katherine, Kookie, Koko, Kitty, and so forth.
Gnome will no longer be able to follow. Aside from 'gertrude', there aren't that many female names beginning with the letter G. And in any case, what are they going to call 'gnome-kate'? Gate? Gkate? Gnate?
Mwahaha! Now all we need is a non-crashing build of KDE3.0, and we shall rule the world!
- undoware.ca