cc added: John J. Foerch; he doesn't subscribe to implementations-list. Why not, John? :) On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 7:38 AM, Frank Fischer <[email protected]> wrote:

[snip]

The point is that emacs' own keymaps are not powerful enough or well suited for modal editing (in my opinion).  But it's relatively easy to plug another keymap system on top of them.  In fact, the design is similar to emacs' own keymaps and minor/major modes.  That's the reason why other vim-emulation-packages just use emacs-keymaps and minor modes.

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.

[snip]

I have to say that currently the core-keymap-system is a little specific to vim (e.g. it knows of 'motions', 'commands' and 'argument'), but it should not be too difficult to make it more generic (I have some ideas in this direction I'll try in the next days).

And, of course, there're some aspects that are not so easy to do the right way for all thinkable model-editing-schemes, like undo/redo or repeating.  The current implementation is oriented at vim's.  I have to think about making it more generic.

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? That takes work, and maybe nobody will ever take advantage of that work. 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? ^ [1]. http://jjfoerch.com/modal-mode/ ^ [2]. Homepage: http://www.cs.brown.edu/research/plt/software/divascheme/ ; manual: http://www.cs.brown.edu/research/plt/software/divascheme/doc.txt ^ [3]. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14410/why-are-there-so-few-modal-editors-...