Interface for other editors (was: vi-mode possible?)

[Christian Couder]

Mathias Puetz wrote:

> On Tue, 21 Dec 1999, you wrote:
> >
> >There were people wanting this feature, but there is no plan to implement it
> >yet.
> >I also think that it would be better and easier to implement other
> >editor-modes than to interface with other editors.
> >
> Pardon me, are you saying it is easier to rewrite
> millions of lines of code to implement all what XEmacs
> can do for kwrite ?!?

No, see below.

> If it's just the 10 most common keystrokes that you want to map,
> I don't consider that as much of a gain (although it helps for simple
> editing). That's not why people like to stick with vi or Emacs,
> it's because of their feature richness (which makes them usually hard to
> learn for beginners) why full-time programmers love them.

I think that some people just want some of the editor features of emacs or vi.
For these people, an emacs or a vi mode in KDevelop is enought.
Some other people would like most of (or all) the emacs or vi features. For these
people, it is probably easier and better to add into emacs or vi the KDevelop
features they are missing.

> But implementing a handshake with XEmacs or Vim or other sophisticated
> editor is something which should be much easier to do than what you propose.

I propose only to add an emacs or a vi mode for the editor part, and I think it
should be quite easy, because it is mainly changing the accelerator keystrokes
and the KDevelop user can already change them, though not enought to make
KDevelop behave exactly as emacs or vi, but this is not a big problem to solve.

> It's probably tough to implement the level of integration KDevelop
> has done with kwrite, but I consider even grabbing the xemacs/vi output window
> and replacing the controls by Kdevelop controls (which involves some
> serious hacking of their codes) far simpler than trying to reimplement
> their features in new kwrite modes (although feel free to do that
> if you have the time).

I don't want to reimplement emacs or vi features.

> For someone with good ELisp knowledge (sorry, I don't) it should be relatively
> easy to implement a kdevelop-mode for Emacs to do all the neat stuff
> you can do with the integrated kwrite right now AND have all the power
> of Emacs available. Any XEmacs/ELisp professionals out their who are up
> to this job ?

If you want to implement some KDevelop features in emacs, then it is not IMHO the
best list to ask.

Christian.