D-Bus in vim, and collaborative editing - vim_dev

Message from discussion D-Bus in vim, and collaborative editing

Sergey Khorev

More options May 17 2008, 10:58 am

From: Sergey Khorev <sergey.kho...@gmail.com>

Date: Sat, 17 May 2008 18:58:53 +0400

Local: Sat, May 17 2008 10:58 am

Subject: Re: D-Bus in vim, and collaborative editing

  Reply to author
  |
  Forward
  | Print
  | View thread
  | Show original
  | Report this message
  | Find messages by this author
  

Alban,

There is an in-built Netbeans interface in Vim, it works in GVim only.
(See functions netbeans_Xt_connect, netbeans_gtk_connect,
netbeans_w32_connect which set up async socket handler)

I think you could write a bridge between D-Bus and Netbeans interface as
a separate process.

> I would like to have a support for D-Bus [1] in vim, and then be able
> to write vim plug-ins that use the vim D-Bus connection to communicate
> with external applications. My goal [2] is to be able to control the vim
> buffer from other applications to enable collaboration features (as
> Gobby does) between different editors (vim, emacs) using the same
> D-Bus protocol.

> I don't know the vim code, but with help from the #vim IRC channel, I
> wrote a vim plug-in in python [3] that fires a D-Bus signal each time
> the vim buffer is changed. It seems possible to inform external
> applications of each change of the vim buffer.

> I want also my plug-in to receive to D-Bus methods, so that external
> applications can change the content of the vim buffer. However, I am
> unable to do that with my plug-in because of the way the D-Bus
> connection is implemented in my plug-in.

> The D-Bus connection is an Unix socket. When vim fires a signal from the
> plug-in, some data is sent through the socket to the dbus-daemon
> process. But to receive D-Bus signal, the socket file descriptor must
> be added somehow in the vim main loop in order to call a function to
> read on the socket and I have no idea how to do that from a vim plug-in
> in Python. It may not be possible to do it from a Python plug-in without
> modifying the vim code.

> It seems that this "mainloop" problem is not specific to D-Bus but other
> projects has the same problem:

> - Clewn [4]: GDB support in vim. Clewn is an external program but need
> a patch in vim to work.
> - Slim-Vim [5]: Vim interface to SLIME, the project is abandoned. It
> needed a way to add a socket connection.
> - Eclim [6]: Eclipse integration in Vim: Vim instances communicate with
> Eclipse through the Eclim interface.
> - Vim client-server communication [7]

> The problem is, there is a lot of different projects, I don't know where
> to start looking :)

> Can you explain me the place in the vim code where the main loop is
> implemented? Should I look at some of the above projects or other ones?

> Thanks for your help,

> Alban

> [1] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/dbus
> [2] http://alban.apinc.org/blog/2008/05/11/c
> [3] http://people.collabora.co.uk/~alban/d/2008/05/remotecontrol.vim
> [4] http://clewn.sourceforge.net/
> [5] http://wiki.alu.org/Slim-Vim
> [6] http://eclim.sourceforge.net/
> [7] http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/remote.html

Reply to author Forward