[implementations-list] Maciej's from-scratch Vim emulation project (was: Transferring maintainership of Vimpulse)

Mon Jun 22 22:37:12 CEST 2009

On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 1:50 AM, Jason Spiro<jasonspiro3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 6:14 PM, Stephen Bach <sjbach at sjbach.com> wrote:
> ...
>> I agree there are problems with viper, but I'm not positive replacing it
>> wholesale is the best approach.  In my experience, the more ambitious
>> the project, the less likely it is to reach any milestone of usefulness.
>> Viper is 13000+ lines of seasoned code, and it mostly works in its goal
>> of pure-vi emulation.
>
> I agree.  It would be very hard to rewrite Viper from scratch.  As
> popular blogger Joel Spolsky wrote:
>
>     "The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd.
> Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been
> found, and they've been fixed. ... [Architectural] problems can be
> solved, one at a time, by carefully moving code, refactoring, changing
> interfaces. Even fairly major architectural changes can be done
> without throwing away the code. On the Juno project we spent several
> months rearchitecting at one point: just moving things around,
> cleaning them up, creating base classes that made sense, and creating
> sharp interfaces between the modules. But we did it carefully, with
> our existing code base, and we didn't introduce new bugs or throw away
> working code."[1]
>
> The books "Working with Legacy Code" by Michael Feathers and
> "Refactoring" by Martin Fowler, and the SourceMaking website[2], talk
> about how to refactor.  The free PDF ebook "Object-Oriented
> Reengineering Patterns"[3] also talks about dealing with old code,
> though I think "Working with Legacy Code" is better.
>
> ...
>> - You seem to know what you're doing, so good luck.  I'll follow your
>>  work, and when vimp / vimpersonator is ready, I'll try it. :-)
>
> Yes; if you go ahead and write it, then when it's ready, I too will
> try it.  Good luck.
>
> -Jason
>
> ^  [1].  http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
>
> ^  [2].  http://sourcemaking.com/refactoring
>
> ^  [3].  http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~scg/OORP/

Hi Maciej,

I was discussing other vi clones for Emacs with Alessandro over Gtalk
today.  I mentioned John J. Foerch's http://jjfoerch.com/modal-mode/
and your project.

How many lines of code is Vimpersonator / Vimp / whatever it's called?
 How well does it work so far?  Could you please post a copy in some
public SVN/Git-hosting site online like www.assembla.com so we could
see it?

-Jason