Sign of life / Vim Touch with syntax highlighting on Android

[Albert Graef]

Hi folks,

sorry for the lack of updates -- after recovering from my illness I've
been somewhat busy. For all of you who're still waiting for my replies,
I really appreciate your patience -- I'll get back to your posts once
the dust begins to settle, hopefully some time next week.

Meanwhile I got myself a little Android tablet which I plan to use as a
configurable OSC control device in one of my courses this semester
(works like a kind of Lemur, using Charlie Roberts' Control app to send
and receive OSC messages over WiFi, nice stuff!). And of course I want
to port Pure to that tablet -- but don't hold your breath yet. ;-)

Although Pure doesn't work on ARM yet, I thought that it might be fun to
at least edit Pure scripts there. Emacs exists on Android, but isn't
really usable yet right now, so I gave Vim Touch (a vim port optimized
for touch screen usage) a go. This one works really great, and it's
straightforward to install the syntax highlighting from the Pure
distribution. You can see Vim Touch with hello.pure loaded in the
screenshot below:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxN7ba9f7QU8aFpIOG9qSTBLREU/edit?usp=sharing

If you who want to try this yourself:

- Grab Vim Touch from Google Play (you'll need both Vim Touch and the
corresponding "Full Runtime" package, see
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.momodalo.app.vimtouch
and
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.momodalo.app.vimtouch.fullruntime).

- Having installed those, just copy the pure.vim file
(https://bitbucket.org/purelang/pure-lang/src/tip/pure/etc/pure.vim) to
/mnt/sdcard/.vim/syntax on your Android device (create that directory if
necessary) and put the following file type description into
/mnt/sdcard/.vim/filetype.vim:

augroup filetypedetect
au BufNewFile,BufRead *.pure setf pure
augroup END

That's it.

For those of you who prefer a more GUIish editor, the best of that sort
that I could find in the app store is the "920 Text Editor"
(https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jecelyin.editor).
Doesn't have code folding, but it supports syntax highlighting, so i
might be able to hack together a highlighting config for it.

(NB: Both apps are free as in beer, of course, and Vim Touch is also
open source. If you have any other suggestions concerning good
programmer editors and IDEs on Android, please share!)

Still way to go before Pure actually runs on Android/ARM, I'm afraid,
though. Now that the LLVM MCJIT more or less works on ARM, there's not
much incentive to fix up the old JIT there. So I think I'll just have to
bite the bullet and port Pure over to the MCJIT. The Android NDK
supports clang, so there's no reason why Pure shouldn't eventually work
there, too, if I can work around MCJIT's limitations. Maybe I'll have a
go at that during the summer break.

Cheers,
Albert

--
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email: agg...@gmail.com, Dr.G...@t-online.de
WWW: http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag