Why lua? or questions about yzis
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:date: 2005-04-13T23:45:00
:category: computer

(This article is a slightly edited version of my post to `comp.editors`_
newsgroup).

I just want to vent my frustration with state of vim on KDE. I hoped
that in the Unix world we will get sooner or later even in GUI world to
the situation equivalent to the one at console, where you have your
$EDITOR set and everything just works (of course, I have it empty, so
vim is what I get). However, as far as I can tell I have these options
at the present (using KDE 3.3.2):

* suck it up and use native KWrite & co. Not that this option wouldn’t
  have some temptation for me (coming originally from M$-Windows,
  although many years ago, I still feel rather well with Shift+arrows,
  Ctrl+[xcvspo]), but there are two things missing:

1. scripting -- although Kate is going to have support for KJS Very
   Soon(TM) it will take years (if ever) to have so developed base of
   scripts as there is currently available for vim (and Emacs, but my
   religious needs are well satisfied by my Lord Jesus Christ, I do not
   need any other religion, thank you :-)). Currently I am getting
   really dependent on VimOutliner (I am a Debian maintainer of its
   package), I am in the process of developing Qualitative analysis
   tools based on Vim (and some Qt-C++ dialogs, maybe later KDE, but
   I have to learn programming with KDE and C++ first), I have ongoing
   flirt with vim-latexsuite, etc.

2. and it wouldn’t help me anyway, because there are so many programs
   which don’t use kpart technology for the editing (KMail, KNode --
   that one at least is willing to open external editor in new window,
   how is the situation with editing box in Konqueror?); shoot! I know
   `it is not KVim’s developers’ fault`_, but it seems to me that
   non-availability of any good KDE vim editor doesn’t help (see below).

* Forget about KDE-only solution and use GVim for Gnome (which is what
  I do now). Aside from being plain ugly (sorry, I am used to KDE
  look&feel; consider my brain to be degenerated if you are Gnome user),
  I get really crappy support for vimpart (it basically doesn’t work at
  all) and of course full power of vim (which is what matters most, so
  I am grinding my teeth and hold it).

* Hope for something better.

The most frustrating part of this situation is that there doesn’t seem
to be any good solution coming, so point #3 sucks a lot. KVim is
officially dead (although it sucked in many ways, it was by far the best
solution to at least some of my problems and I was its somehow happy
user, until it was eliminated from Debian) and there doesn’t seem to be
any replacement coming.

Now, we are getting to yzis. Of course, that I know about that, but I am
afraid it won’t be answer to my problems. I have tried to install M3++
(from the package 20050430-1) and I found it to be somehow nice but
alpha quality. Nothing bad about that (I have a four month daughter, so
I know that we were all young and we all did mess into diapers), but
worse thing is that kyzis doesn’t seem to be much promising.

However, before saying anything else, let me note one more thing. This
message is about personal gripes and I do not want to say that you
should even react to them -- I perfectly understand that you are
volunteers doing what matters to you and you have no obligation towards
me whatsoever. Let me just vent my frustration, please.

1. NIH syndrom everywhere -- why in the h..ll, it is not just a KDE C++
   clone of vim? Why it is not compatible with vim’s syntax files and
   scripts? The most important reason, why I am not using
   Kate/KWrite/etc.  is that I have all these scripts available for vim.
   And I do not think, that anybody will redevelop VimOutliner, and
   myriad other small scripts in Lua, just because it is theoretically
   better language than the vimscript one (and I don’t like it that
   much, but it doesn’t matter -- Perl is also ugly as hell and yet how
   successful it is). Have you ever saw `a list of Emacs clones`_? It is
   quite long and impressive list of totally dead projects, and they are
   all dead, because Gnus doesn’t work there (or Calc, or AucTeX, or
   PSGML, or fill-in any other popular Emacs mode). And BTW, elvis and
   vile are IMHO not doing that well against vim either (whenever, I ask
   something about vi, it is assumed I mean vim), but I may be terribly
   wrong in this respect.

   Or in other words, isn’t creating yet another vi clone with GUI
   extension, something similar to rewriting program (actually, it is
   rewriting a program)? For that see, of course, `Joel on software`_
   and `Jamie Zawinski’s comment about Apple choosing KHTML instead of
   Gecko for Safari`_ or here_.

2. Although I am not programmer, so I cannot comment much about reasons
   why KVim was killed, I still do not feel right about it. After all,
   it DID work. Poorly, but at least as a proof of concept it was
   persuasive enough to make it work well, wasn’t it? Now, we will have
   to wait for couple of years before yzis stabilize, before we can
   repeat argument on KMail/KNode/etc. people to finally use kpart for
   editor, and even after that the result will be suboptimal to well
   working kvim. Oh, well.

3. It is slow as molasses. I understand that it is alpha-version, but
   having an experience with kvim (and to some extent with gvim and
   kwrite as well), I am really afraid that it is going to be far from
   vim, I was used to. There used to be a times, when vi users joked
   about EMACS, that it is “Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping”.
   Well, ``free`` shows that I have 250 MB of RAM, but still I think
   that this joke went slightly out of popularity these days. Oh well.


I wonder what reactions I will get on NG.

.. _`comp.editors`:
    news:comp.editors
.. _`it is not KVim’s developers’ fault`:
    http://groups-beta.google.com/group/linux.debian.maint.kde/browse_thread/thread/d8863e0dd351e54
.. _`a list of Emacs clones`:
    http://www.faqs.org/faqs/emacs-implementations/
.. _`Joel on software`:
    http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
.. _`Jamie Zawinski’s comment about Apple choosing KHTML instead of Gecko for Safari`:
    http://news.com.com/2100-1023-980492.html
.. _here:
    http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html