Using VIM as the text editor in KDevelop

[Roland Krause]

Jonathan,

--- Jonathan Gardner <gardner at sounddomain.com> wrote:
> Okay, Roland, work with me. I am glad for your brute comments! I
> don't
> understand the philosophy of KDE, I am still just learning. I will
> read up on
> kparts today. I have some comments for you below...

There is a pretty good book, I think it was "KDE-2 Development" by
David Sweet et al, also available on Andamooka.com. I am reading it
myself and it explains the kpart, DCOM stuff really well. 

Problem with kdevelop is, that much of it (most) was written before 
these techniques came out/matured. So there is lots of infrastructure
to be worked on, which in turn is the reason most developers believe(d)
it was time to start over from scratch. 

> 
> Okay, what I really mean is there are a few HTML viewing programs -
> IE,
> Netscape, Konqueror, and Links, and Lynx, and I am sure there are
> more, and
> there will be more in the future! I think it is bad to have KDE rely
> on one
> HTML rendering program, one text editing program, and one this and
> one that.

Yes, you are correct, konqueror btw. can use Mozillas rendering engine
now. Yet, I believe firmly, that with such a restricted number of
developers, it is quite necessary to focus. 

> Leave the text editors to the guys who know how to write and maintain
> text
> editors. Why is KDE so involved with a single program that no one
> seems to care
> about? 

Hmm, very good question, I believe that most KDE developers rather use
emacs or vim or something but not kwrite. This is then in turn the
reason why kwrite sucks so much compared to the latter. A program only
gets improvements that are triggered by the need of some user to have a
certain feature. 

As you said, it is a cumbersome, long term project to write a decent
programmers texteditor. Yet, times have changed, keyboards nowadays
have cursor keys, functions keys and other mechanisms that make life
easier for Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift impaired people like me. That
is a matter of that the emacs camp and the vi camp have a lot trouble
to realize. I know I can customize my keyboard, but I'd rather  
spend my time on something different. 

Another huge factor in a text editor is that it must be programmable.
Now, programmable means that there is some scripting language or
interface, so that users can write macros for all kinds of things.

What that in turn breaks down to, is that the editor itself has a
carefully crafted API that can be used. This is exactly what kdevelop
needs and I believe kwrite can deliver on it. 

Used together with kparts and maybe python as a scripting language,
kwrite could be a really good solution. 

If someone wanted to make a kvim in kdevelop, I honestly think it's not
that difficult to do in the first place either. The code base for the
kwrite component is fairly small actually. 

Best regards, 
Roland

PS: I have cc'ed the developer list on this, there is entirely not
enough traffic on the list anyway :-) Hope you dont mind. 


=====
--
Roland Krause
In the garage of life there are mechanics and 
there are drivers. Mechanics wanted!

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