Thought experiment re IPC

[Edward K. Ream]

Wouldn't it be great if we could somehow just replace Leo's body pane with pyzo's or vim's.  See #990.

Well, that's not going to happen right away, but it might happen in a year or three.

A thought experiment shows the problems.  Suppose we could, say by using D-Bus, magically connect vim and Leo so that vim becomes Leo's body pane.  Well, Leo's users would now have to configure vim as well as Leo!

Worse, vim now has to be told how to "escape" back to Leo, and vice versa.  It's quite a design challenge.

Instead, a single app, (Leo or vim) must be responsible for all the interactions.  For now, this is the only way to maintain the illusion of simplicity that I talk about so often.

Things could change in future.  Desktop web assembly promises many cool things, including a platform independent way of running C++ or rust (or elisp) code.  When that happens, we could imagine compiling both neovim (or emacs) and Leo into webasm.  In that case, we could tweak both Leo and vim to work together.

Summary

Embedding vim or emacs into Leo isn't going to happen now, but might be possible in a year or three.

All comments welcome.

Edward