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.

Comments

Woohoo!

[larien]

Never again will I end up getting errors when I hit escape while editting an email message...:)

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.

april 1st

[phrostie]

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!

Whatever next - KEmacs & GEmacs?

[ukryule]

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 ...

Re:Whatever next - KEmacs & GEmacs?

[ari_j]

You can't do this with Emacs. Emacs can't be inserted into any windowing system on any OS, because EMACS is it's own operating system.

Google Cache

[bobdown2001]

Well it looks like we Slashdotted it already.

As usual you can view using the trusty Google cache by clicking here.

Yeah I know I know ....karma whore :0p

Re:Erm...

[big_hairy_mama]

First off, let me say that I actually use Emacs so I'm not (totally) just flaming.

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 /. 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 :)

Why didn't Mr. Taco just say...

[Rhinobird]

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!"

Re:Nice, serious, but no thanks

[reynaert]

Defies the whole persona of vim. vim loses what makes it useful when you stick it in a window and add menus and buttons.

You'd better reread Vim's design goals. From the documentation:

Vim is not a shell or an Operating System. You will not be able to run a shell inside Vim or use it to control a debugger. This should work the other way around: Use Vim as a component from a shell or in an IDE. A satirical way to say this: "Unlike Emacs, Vim does not attempt to include everything but the kitchen sink, but some people say that you can clean one with it. ;-)"

Vim is designed to be embedded in other applications. An example of this is the integration with Sun Visual Workshop, support for which is included in the official version.

Three Words (to start with)

[fm6]

Cut-and-paste.

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.

Names

[Snafoo]

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!