Comments on: Vim. Other Editors Don’t Do Such Things

By: Arun Chaganty

Arun Chaganty — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 17:53:46 +0000

Hey,
I have not been able to find much time to continue work on my plugin, but I’d be more than happy to help you. The code is pretty well modularlised and (I think) well commented. The vim parts are all good, only the Anjuta side is a bit out of date due to lots of code change in Anjuta.

The approach is similar to that followed by PiDA, i.e. using a GtkSocket and GtkPlug. I used X11’s ICCCM to communicate with Vim (this is exactly how the vim –remote-expr commands work) as the DBus interface was often a bit buggy (especially when the user was typing something and a method had to be called). The DBus interface is currently used only for signals from the editor.

Looking at LEO, this looks like it should be easily implementable. I would highly recommend looking at PiDA because it was written in Python and does exactly this.

PiDA: http://pida.co.uk/

All the best, and feel free to drop me a line if you’d like any help!

Cheers,
–
Arun Tejasvi Chaganty
http://arun.chagantys.org/

By: Tom Fetherston

Tom Fetherston — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 14:04:09 +0000

I looking to do a similar integration of Gvim and Leo, a python based outline using literate editor. Did this get further work? I be interested in seeing what you used.

Tom

By: arunchaganty

arunchaganty — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 08:39:13 +0000

@Ryan Paul: Well, that’s what I’m doing now. Thanks for confirming that it’ll work

@Alban: Yeah, perhaps after my SoC I can try to hook DBus into vim rather than put a layer over it with a python plugin…

By: Alban

Alban — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 10:37:48 +0000

Good to see you are working on this. I would prefer the solution #3, but it needs a lot of time…

By: Ryan Paul

Ryan Paul — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 22:28:52 +0000

I did some experimentation a while back where I used XEmbed to put a GVim instance in a GTK+ application. I used Vim’s internal Python scripting interface and the Python D-Bus bindings to implement a control API with D-Bus so I could have buffers listed in a GTK+ TreeView. I suspect that you could use a similar approach.

By: arunchaganty

arunchaganty — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 18:09:42 +0000

@hario: Yeah I’ve looked at PIDA (it inspired me to use GtkSockets actually). It doesn’t actually request much out of gvim yet. It uses #1 wherever it needs to though.

By: hario

hario — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 15:40:43 +0000

PIDA (http://pida.co.uk/) is an IDE able of embedding GVim. It is done in Python+PyGTK so the ideas present in the code should be easily reusable. I don’t know how PIDA interacts with GVim, but reading source comments my guess is that it does something like your solution #1.5

It would be very nice to see GVim embedded in Anjuta in a stable fashion. Hope the information helps.

By: arunchaganty

arunchaganty — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 14:18:12 +0000

@Jens: Actually, I did not know that, Thanks for the link. That uses the netbeans protocol too.
@ac: That sound’s like a great idea! I can’t believe I didn’t think of that. Thanks.

By: asdf

asdf — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 10:39:04 +0000

Also look at http://eclim.sourceforge.net/

By: ac

ac — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 08:27:53 +0000

Just write a vim plugin which talk whatever IPC protocol you like, dbus, pipe, X selection…

I would imagine a 20 line of vim python plugin work give you full control of vim from the outside. Then you load the vim python plugin whenever you start a vim plugin from inside the Anjuta.

You known you can write plugins from vim in perl, python, ruby, tcl or vim builtin script.