On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 at 8:38:42 PM UTC-4, Gary Johnson wrote: > On 2013-04-24, Sung Pae wrote: > > > So I retract my last response: a global-local formatprg is clearly > > useful for both prose and code, and comes at the cost of a small > > non-breaking change. > > > > Tony Mechelynck's criticism is that it is superfluous. I disagree�, but > > you will have to convince him before Bram will pay any attention. :) > > > > Sung Pae > > > > � Why have formatprg at all then? > > 'formatprg' existed in Vim 6 and possibly in earlier versions; > 'formatexpr' did not appear until Vim 7. > > Vim seems to be moving away from relying on external programs to > expand functionality and toward having more capability built-in. > One of the reasons for this is to accommodate Windows users who > don't have access to the rich set of tools available in Unix.
I'm guessing that is just speculation. Invoking external tools which communicate via stdin/stdout, on Windows, is very useful and will continue to be one of the valuable aspects of Vim. And now that git (which ships with MSYS2) is quasi-ubiquitous on Windows, unix tooling is common. > Another reason is that built-in tools have access to Vim's variables > and functions and allow for better integration with Vim. > > I think that 'formatexpr' offers better functionality than > 'formatprg', including the ability to run external programs, which > is probably why Tony says that it's superfluous. 'formatprg' is > simpler to use in some cases and, more importantly, must be kept for > backwards compatibility. This doesn't address the problem of being invoked on every keystroke. Making 'formatprg' global-local is a low-risk change that reduces inconsistency and adds some convenience and flexibiity. While flexibility of 'formatexpr' is nice, there should also be a continued push to make Vim's features more consistent where it can be done at negligible cost. --- Justin M. Keyes -- -- You received this message from the "vim_dev" maillist. Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "vim_dev" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
