On Thu, Jul 02, 2009 at 05:47:18PM +0000, Jason Spiro wrote:
Would it be practical and useful to send patches to the FSF to improve Emacs's keymap system? Maybe the same improvements that would make the keymap system better for us would also help other Emacs mode developers.
I'm not sure. Perhaps if the extension would be completely compatible to the current implementation (this should be possible) and if we really know how the new keymap-system should work. Perhaps vim-mode is a good place to test and develop it.
Some last words. I don't think we should try to build a system that can be the base of every thinkable modal-editing-scheme. Focusing on vim seems more important to me, because I think this is what most people need and most people are used to.
Frank, both you, and also John J. Foerch with his modal-mode[1], are already making accommodations for non-Vi-like modal editor emulation now. Why make any such accommodations now?
To make it clear, I'm not really interested in supporting something else than vim. But I think when I have the idea of supporting other modal-modes in mind, the single parts of the code get more and more orthogonal and I could learn what we *really* need to get a good implementation of vim-bindings. I'm just a fan of independent subsystems that are easy to maintain.
That takes work, and maybe nobody will ever take advantage of that work.
The work is not that much bigger than supporting vim only. And hey, it's fun to play around with it ;)
AFAICT, only one new non-Vi-like modal editor has gained even minor popularity nowadays anymore: DivaScheme[2], an add-on to DrScheme for editing Scheme code more easily. I suspect that modal editing has been losing market share over time, and that it will never regain the market share it used to have long ago. For more on why, see Leon Bambrick's comment at [3].
By the way, I no longer code in Lisp anymore nowadays. But if you do -- do you think it would be nice if some of DivaScheme's new editing commands were added to Vim and Vimpulse?
I don't know DivaScheme so I can't say anything but I'll definitively have a look. Frank