On 27/07/11 00:26, Tobbe Lundberg wrote:
Does anyone know of any attempts at making gvim (for MS Windows) look
more modern? (Using a standard gui border for split windows, a
gui-window for completion lists, a standard gui status bar, etc)
If something like this doesn't already exist, would anyone be interested
in me tying to code it? (Possibly even helping me out?) It would
probably have to be maintained as a set of patches against the official
vim releases.
//Tobbe
Good luck! :-/
The problem with GUI window splitters is that they would still have to
be exactly the width of one character cell in the current 'guifont'
whatever it be, and for horizontal splitters, either of negligible
height, or just high enough to include a GUI-style "Vim status line"
which (for alignment between parts of various windows' status lines) may
still have to be in a monospace font, probably the current 'guifont'.
Otherwise I think it would not be possible without rewriting all of gvim
from the ground up, and I don't think that this kind of code forking
(compared to console Vim) is desirable, let alone humanly possible.
If you don't like the default look and feel of gvim, it is already
possible to change it quite a lot by changing the 'guifont' and the
colorscheme (and if none of the available schemes find favour in your
eyes, you can always write your own, it is infinitely easier than
patching the C/C++ code, and unlike the latter it runs no risk of making
the program nonfunctional or even crashy).
In my experience, most proposals to change Vim's or gvim's behaviour
fundamentally (as opposed to extending its power, as was done in the
past with adding a GUI, menus, (partial) support for RTL scripts,
support of Unicode, tab pages, etc., without changing anything to
existing functionality) come from users who have not yet imbibed Vim's
"philosophy". Vim is different from other programs, sometimes quite
different, even in respects where they are all more or less "alike". The
solution is not to twist Vim out of shape to make it "like all the
others", but rather to learn Vim as something different (and there is
quite a lot to be learned about it; I regard that as a quality, not a
blemish, even though I am far from having mastered all aspects of Vim
perfectly) and to find out how these differences can make you perform
your editing tasks more efficiently.
Yes, in some respects Vim is a kind of dinosaur; I think that it
descends in straight line from editors which were used on systems where
you had no screen but a typewriter which could move the paper in one
direction only, no other keyboard than a plain typewriter keyboard, and
no mouse; and it is still quite feasible to use Vim without using the
mouse or the keyboard's cursor movement keys at all (and some old Vim
hands will tell you that _that_ is the "true" way to use Vim, indeed the
"only right way"; I don't go that far); but with all its
old-fashionedness it is still (IMHO) one of the very best, possibly
*the* best plain-text editor for the 21st century.
Best regards,
Tony.
--
Trying to be happy is like trying to build a machine for which the only
specification is that it should run noiselessly.
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