[implementations-list] Why accommodate non-Vi-like modal-editor emulation now? (was: Early implementation of...)

[Frank Fischer]

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