vim gui's / vim api

[Caleb Cushing]

I've noticed most recently the need for a vi(m) environment is several gui's
as sort of an embedded editor. this is really a several year old problem.

what I'm wondering is... is there anything vim could do to facillitate/ease
the implementation of such gui's. I hear rumors of a netbeans protocol (was
that for the netbeans ide? 'cause that don't work no more) but I'm not sure
that is what's needed for all the problems. not being a programmer...

would it be possible in future version (maybe 8.0) for vim to implement an
api? or perhaps there is another way to get functionality easily embedded
into just about any editor enviroment needed.
--
Caleb Cushing

Blog http://xenoterracide.blogspot.com

[Philippe Fremy]

Actually and to my surprise, vim is missing very little to be usable in
connection with an IDE. I plan to propose patches for the parts that
could help further. Those will be very small patches because everything
is already there in vim. No need to wait for 8.0 .

The netbean stuff is really not netbean related but a socket interface
to control vim from a remote program. If that remote program is an IDE,
you have what you want.

My plan is to get a generic python vim-remote-controller as a first
milestone, and then get the same things in other frameworks: gtk, Qt,
MFC, whatever...

I'll keep this list (and yzis list) updated about it.

Philippe

[Ali Afshar]

Hi,

PIDA http://pida.co.uk/ is an IDE which embeds Vim like this (and has
since Vim 6). As far as we can tell, Vim is missing nothing to make it
usable in this way. It also includes a Python remote controller for
Vim.

Obligatory screenshot: http://pida.co.uk/files/screenshots/pida_0-5_13.png

Cheers,

Ali

[Philippe Fremy]

I checked and the solution is not really generic. Pida uses X atoms to
communicate with gvim, which won't work in environement where vim does
not use X (like Windows).

The vim window embedding is done using a Gtk X socket which is even more
dependent on X and Gtk. I don't think that such window embedding works
with Gtk on Windows, nor that it works without Gtk but on another
toolkit. Qt has in theory something for embedding X windows using the
socket protocol but last time I checked, it did not work reliably.

Another aspect is that I want to build a KTextEditor KDE interface,
which provides many advanced editing services that go beyond the typical
"open that file", and "where is the cursor ?". This will push the vim
interface in interesting ways. If it succeeds, it will give really
strong control on the remote vim.

Philippe

[Ali Afshar]

Yes your work will certainly help us giving better control. The problem
with the X-based communication is that that is the current Vim remote
procedure protocol on X. Windows uses Com. I am not sure what you would
plan to replace this with. If you plan some kind of socket-based
communication, that would be great.

Embedding is even worse, Xembed on X (as you say) with MDI on Windows
(which I could never get to work). I have no idea how you would hope to
resolve this issue other than write a wrapper that does either one or
the other depending on where it is. I am clueless about OSX. As for Qt,
I seem to remember it working reasonably well for XEmbed, really all you
need to give the thing is an X Window ID, and Vim will jump into it.

Please keep in touch with us while you do this, as I say it would be a
great help to us.

Ali