On Friday 16 March 2007 01:54, A.J.Mechelynck wrote: > Josh wrote: >> any ideas about why support was dropped for kvim. > > My guess is: no one at kde wanted to go on doing it. > Maybe they ran into too > many snags and didn't think it was worth it.
The KVim development team found some unsurmountable limitations in creating a 'truly' KDE app from GVim, so they started a new, Vim-inspired KDE and console editor called Yzis. From http://www.yzis.org/devel/history : Before working on Yzis, the authors (Mickael Marchand, Thomas Capricalli and Philippe Fremy) had been working on GVim. GVim is clearly the best vi compatible editor today. It contains tons of features, which are very clear improvements upon the original vi: visual selection, unlimited undo, powerful syntax highlighting, script language, splitted windows, ... We did two things with GVim. First, we ported it on KDE and created KVim . The second step was to make KVim embeddable as an editor component into any KDE application. The idea was to be able to use a vi editor anywhere: in KDevelop, in Kate, in KMail, ... We managed to complete both tasks but the second one was very difficult to achieve and a number of problems could not be overcome. For example, kvim can not have multiple windows on the same buffer, and thus won't integrate in Kate. (snip) So, on one side we had implementation limitations and problems, on the other side it was not possible to do any new developments on the editor. We discussed that with the GVim team and came to the conclusion that it was not possible to work with GVim to have a vi-like editor in KDE as a good component. At this point, the decision was simple. Either spend lot of time in working around limitations of GVim, or dropping the idea of a good vi editor component for KDE or start a new vi editor. Kudos to Thomas Capricelli and Mickael Marchand who took over the third decision. This decision was taken shortly before Fosdem 2003. The design documents and the name were hacked during the Fosdem. -- Giuseppe "Oblomov" Bilotta
