Slashdot Mirror
Why this? Yet Another vi-based Editor?
Poizon writes "The guys from freehackers.org have begun developing yet another vi-like editor, called Yzis (speak: "Why this?"). Their primary goal is to seperate the text processing engine and the GUI, in order to be able to integrate it into window managers like KDE as a native component. They have previously worked on KVim, a Vim port to KDE, so chances are good that they will succeed with Yzis. Sounds interesting, doesn't it?"
This is one of the things Vim 7 will do. And really, I couldn't bear going back to plain old vi after having used vim for so long. Too many features missing...
ziss zounds quite intellestink.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
You can use some 'vi' shortcuts in Cocoa's NSTextField (or is it NSTextView?), which is used for text input fields. I'm using Safari, so I can hit ^A and go to the beginning of the line, ^E for the end, ^D to forward-delete, etc.
-Ster
Geeks must have some sort of Advertising Impairment Syndrome, where in order to make a brand-name, they take the most unpronouncable and esoteric combinations of characters and stick them together.
It's like all the crazies who go ballistic at people when people don't pronounce a hard "G" at the beginning of "Gnome". Why the fuck should they? It's pronounced differently in every other word beginning with "G-N".
This might get modded flamebait, but every geek on slashdot knows it's true. Slashdot ITSELF is an example (tee hee! "http colon slash slash slash dot dot org!"). It IS cool, but it severely impedes the chances that anyone will ever recognize your product, or even download it, because if I had a conversation with a friend about this, I'd never be able to go google for it without specifically asking how to spell it.
Why do another vi when the ultimate vi based editor is here ?
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
Yes, but the whole world would probably be happy if their computer was as simple to use as their TV, if their cars could drive themselves, and if all food came prepackaged and ready-to-eat.
But then there's us, the mechanics, the cooks, and yes, the computer geeks who demand a whole lot more from our tools. And something as simple as notepad.exe sure as hell aint enough for us.
Sorry if manual transmissions and charcoal bbq's are "out-of-date", but you can do a lot more and have a lot more fun with them. Same with Vim, and vi motion keys.
Ok it wasn't a question above, but you explained one good reason for picking goofy and goofily spelled names - findability on Google.
Would you rather search for "slashdot" on Google, or "nerd news"? Which one will give the most accurate results?
Imagine searching for "VI Editor Plugin". I don't know about you, but I'd rather search for "Yzis".
.sigs are for post^Hers.
I agree that vi is a PITA when you are used to the new colorful world of windows, buttons and menus.
:s/I/we/g and you are done.
But... this project is aiming at providing a plugin-like editor for all applications.
Example: I am currently typing this text in a small textarea in Opera.
Imagine I'd like to replace all occurences of "I" with "we". What can I do? Search and spell checking works fine in Opera (I don't know about other browsers), even on texts in textareas, which is already something. But a Find&Replace function is simply not there.
Now imagine your browser with your favorite editor (like vi) as plugin. You do the great vi-magic like
I don't think these guys are targetting the Word Processor market. There are several of those already.
VI is a powerful text editor. I would love to see it embedded in more documents, if only that I can seemly switch between VI the text editor, and use my VI commands in this Slashdot webform, and then hop on over to Evolution to type up a quick email.
After a while, you have the need search the documents for all occurances of a pattern that begins with "http://www.", "https://www" or "ftp://ftp", a common string in the middle, and a variety of filenames in the end. Each line needs to be turned from a plain text string into an HTML hyperlink.
BTW, you need to replace 65% of these, not 100%, so you might want to confirm each change.
And by the way, you need to make this change on 50 files.
You can do that in VI, and it's actually suprisingly easy once you go through the learning curve.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Command mode being the default will confuse average users to death. Text boxes should clearly be emacs based so regular people won't know the difference, but people who know how to use a good editor will have all the commands available.
This is a product for that .1% of the population who wants it, not the 99.9% who don't.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Try it out for yourself and find out why none of us KDE users can live without its Browser, its E-mail client or its complete office suite.
-
sig sig sputnik
There are already a good deal of VI based editors... Not to bash on their project or anything, it still seems interesting, and it's not a bad idea. But perhaps they would be better off just taking something such as vim or some other similar editor and modifying it... Or even making something a bit new. Most people will still stick with editors like open-office, because of they way they work, and making another VI editor that doesn't really break the mold wont change this. Just my two cents.
99.9% of the people who know what a text editor is, and deliberately choose it over a word processor, want much more than to simply "start typing". More than likely, they'll want the behavior to be different when they're typing C++ source code than when they're typing HTML. Those writing a novel are going to have different needs than those writing a sendmail configuration file.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Whenever you move the mouse to the top menubar and select save in wordpad, you are entering command mode. Move the mouse back down to the text area and you are back in edit mode.
Command mode being the default will confuse average users to death. Text boxes should clearly be emacs...
So, just make insert mode default and 95% of users will never notice anything, but if you make emacs the default you'll end up with a browser within the editor within the browser. I know that browsers have been touted as an alternative to operating systems but let's not make that alternative OS emacs.
Well, if you were using Mozilla you could grab mozex. You can make it open up a terminal window with vim when you edit a textbox. When you save it gets plopped back in the textbox. It's not exactly seamless, but it sure makes webmail and stuff a lot nicer to use.
"I don't think these guys are targetting the Word Processor market."
:wq all the way through my doco and emails ;-)
They should. I got
if
This sounds great! Finally I can have a Cocoa GUI for VIM!
The above is not worth reading.
What about have fun, program, enjoy yourself?
Frankly people that immediately go in market-speak mode are a real nuisance....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It might be time to replace Vim's macro langague with a more widespread, general purpose language. Lisp anyone?
# (/.);;
- : float -> float -> float =
Just wait until you read my upcoming novel. It's called "sendmail.cf: How I wasted my life"
You will actually scare people off by pitching what seems to be an out-of-date typewriter.
Yes, but isn't it fun watching them run?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
All of these run on Windows only but there are a lot of Unix/Linux eds that have Win32 ports. There are other tools (IDEs and so on) there as well. I found that site while looking for a Windows version of PICO - I ended up using nano instead, which I didn't know existed (old Unix head that I am). Nano runs great on a Windows console, BTW.
Personally I would like to see someone come up with a list or a wiki of all free/libre editors for *nix/*BSD. There are a few lists around, but none are very comprehensive.
ugh. of course the authors just HAD to do this in C++, making it a bitch to integrate into objective-c based programs. At the very least objective-c++ with os x will work, but the gnustep people are completely shut in the dark. why do people code in that unportable language? c LINKS WITH EVERYTHING. sigh.
- tristan
would allow me to connect it to an emacsclient session. That way I can take advantage of all the goodies I have loaded into my main emacs session, have seamless integration with my kill and search rings and not take a year and a day (er, 10 seconds) to load.
I can only hope that the interfaces necessary to do this will fall out of this work.
You can keep your 4 meg text editor.
This sounds awesome. Vi is cool!!!! quit exit :q :q!
done :q!!!!!!!
dammit!
close editor
freak~!4%)(*@#@@(*!@*&)
No, they should run $EDITOR or $VISUAL and be done with it.
Am I dead yet?
"Fuck me hell Tom, what's that?"
"It's me belt Turkish."
"No Tommy there's a gun in your trousers.
What's a gun doing in your trousers?"
"It's for protection!"
"Protection from what, Zee Germans?"
Free as in mason.
wtf? How on *earth* is this a troll?!?
You reckon you wasted your life on sendmail.cf? Check this out:
I tried to post this to slashdot, but I got the following: "Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters."
sendmail blows slashdot's little brain.
"Otaku unite." -
Niira - nayami@anime-chat.com
eight megabytes and constant swapping is a way of life, not a simple text editor. :-)
If you want plain text editing use e3 or nano.
vi with insert mode as default is a good alternative for plugins because it doesn't get in the way and is still powerful. All other texteditors use some cryptic Control-something-shortcuts that nobody understands anyway...
After a while, you have the need search the documents for all occurances of a pattern that begins with "http://www.", "https://www" or "ftp://ftp", a common string in the middle, and a variety of filenames in the end. Each line needs to be turned from a plain text string into an HTML hyperlink.
:we1232asfdcf!&QW&RsEA or C-M-X-frobnicate-foo-yadayadayada nonsense that VI and emacs fans rave about. Come back when you can fit in with the rest of my desktop environment.
BTW, you need to replace 65% of these, not 100%, so you might want to confirm each change.
And by the way, you need to make this change on 50 files.
You can do that in VI, and it's actually suprisingly easy once you go through the learning curve.
You can do that in VI? Wow, how amazing! Unlike every other editor I've used (apart from MS Notepad, and possibly pico), where... uh, you can also do that.
VI was amazing back in the '60s (or was it the '70s? I haven't a clue, it was well before I was born anyway), but today we have things called "UI standards" which mean that 99% of applications use a common set of shortcut keys. There's no excuse for all this
> quit
:quit works just fine and so does :exit
:q
:q prompts you is that you haven't saved
:q! done :q!!!!!!! dammit! close editor freak
:q! or :wq would do the trick.
In my vim,
Are you still in insert mode?
>
The reason
your file yet. It is no diffierent from those annoying "Are you sure?" dialogs.
>
Surely, just typing
This is why sites like slashdot get less respect than they should. "Seperate" is not a word. Come on, editors, is there something non-open-sourcey or Microsofty about a quick spell check before posting an item?
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
link. It has been for a long time.
I hate to be the one to bring up Emacs, but I've been craving an Emacs editing widget for ages. Hell, to make both camps happy, it would be nice to see the desktop environments provide an editing widget that could be customized to be either like a Windows edit box, or Vim or Emacs.
It's frustrating as all hell to try to delete a line with ctrl-a ctrl-y and end up with a bunch of selected text. Sigh.
My mistake; that should be "grammar", not "grammer".
Sorry for the mispelligng.
For anybody's information, here is a more detailed explanation of the "Why this":
v =6 10&view=auto
...
... We managed to complete both tasks but the second one
http://mirror1.yzis.org/viewcvs/trunk/README?re
History:
========
Before working on Yzis, the authors (Mickael Marchand, Thomas Capricalli and
Philippe Fremy) had been working on GVim. GVim is clearly the best vi
compatible editor today. It contains tons of features, which are very clear
improvements upon the original vi: visual selection, unlimited undo, powerful
syntax highlighting, script language, splitted windows,
We did two things with GVim. First, we ported it on KDE and created KVim. The
second step was to make KVim embeddable as an editor component into any KDE
application. The idea was to be able to use a vi editor anywhere: in KDevelop,
in Kate, in KMail,
was very difficult to achieve and a number of problems could not be overcome.
For example, kvim can not have multiple windows on the same buffer, and thus
won't integrate in Kate.
While working with the gvim code base, we have been comfronted with a growing
amount of difficulites:
- there is a huge pile of C files without much documentation.
- it is difficult to find one's way through the code.
- the code was written in C and has very little abstraction, which make it
difficult to follow.
- the vi engine is tied to the concept of console editor. We have to add hacks
after hacks to make it work as a graphical component (for example, we need
to fork a process, embed a graphical window, and run an event loop at full
speed while still not taking the whole CPU to just make the component work).
- the main author of GVim is very reluctant to add any small change, even
those that won't affect the current behaviour
- the codebase is very big and the author does not want to introduce any new
feature, in fear of breaking something.
So, on one side we had implementation limitations and problems, on the other
side it was not possible to do any new developments on the editor. We
discussed that with the GVim team and came to the conclusion that it was not
possible to work with GVim to have a vi-like editor in KDE as a good
component.
At this point, the decision was simple. Either spend lot of time in working
around limitations of GVim, or dropping the idea of a good vi editor component
for KDE or start a new vi editor. Kudos to Thomas Capricelli and Mickael
Marchand who took over the third decision. This decision was taken shortly
before Fosdem 2003. The design documents and the name were hacked during the
Fosdem.
They put up a website, a subversion server, mailing lists and started
coding. To avoid the many problems of gvim, we took the following decisions:
1. clearly separate the vi engine from the gui
2. use C++ to provide a clean design
3. abstract the views, the buffer and the gui in the engine
4. have a KDE gui
5. have a text gui
6. provide a C interface in case a hard-core C coder wants to contribute
7. use some Qt classes for the engine. Qt would bring a string class that
handles unicode correctly (multibyte support is knightmare in gvim), efficient
lists implementations, and other goodies. Moreover, we were very familiar and
efficient with Qt.
8. Use tinyQ as a backup solution for the people not willing to link with Qt
just for a few template classes.
Over the time, maintaining a C binding to C++ turn out to be quite tedious and
time consuming. It would also make the code quite complicated. So the C
binding was dropped and yzis started to develop slowly but steadily.
For many people vi starts to make much more sense when they think of it as not having an input and a command mode, but just a command mode. Every key you press is a command. I think a good way to learn vi is to use it first to edit existing files, learning the motion, replacement and delete commands. Then introduce insert and append as just some other commands that happen to be terminated with ESC.
Still, I have to agree that it will confuse most people who have used other editors/wordprocessors.
The reason vi commands are "cryptic" is that they aren't simple chords like your standard shortcuts. They are command sequences which typically include a count, command, and a motion. For example, to delete up through the next four left parenthesis the command is "d4f(". I'd like to see you do that with anything other than vi. And while that example might seem silly to you it's the sort of thing that vi experts do all the time (especially while programming!).
Then why can't they just start typing? What's the click for?
Honestly, I'm not griping I just want to know what the basis was for that. I certainly did not intend it to "insult or enrage" people nor did I try to "mix up vital facts or otherwise distort reality". My intention was to merely note that the program does not need to apeal to all users or even a majority of users or even more than .1% of the population for it to be useful.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Why use vi when there is emacs? :)
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
extern "C" void wrap_cpp_func() // call C++ here
{
}
What's the big deal?
And furthermore - these guys are contributing free code - what right do you have to bitch, bitch?
If you are so concerned about C purity - write it yourself in C.
I'm not sure if anyone will read this butVim 6.3 is out.