the bottom line is this, may I as a noob user use system browser without the mouse , just by shortcuts ? How about the debugger and inspector ? Personally I dont care about vim shortcuts, I am an emacs user and guess what I dont care about emacs shortcuts as well. This why there is no way I am going to bother implementing vim shortcuts which by the way I find them bad , and so do I emacs shortcuts as well. So we are not far apart on this point. But I will try to implement a shortcut based interface. I wish I could figure out pharo in a single day and start doing this stuff. But learning takes time. From time being mouse does not bother because I code slow anyway, but I think the faster I start to code in pharo the more it will make sense to rely more on shortcuts and liberate myself from them mouse. Also I think you are unfair calling emacs a text editor. Its not. I know the consensus is calling emacs a text editor but I dont think thats a fair definition. Because taking a look into emacs will immediately show that is not that diffirent from smalltalk. Its a development enviroment. It has its own language, a very capable one, rich library set not just limited to text editing and an array of development tools. If you add to it a common lisp runtime together with slime , it can give pharo easily a run for its money. I am saying this because you talked about shortcuts of making things "bold" or "italic". In any case I don't think its unreasonable from time to time a new user to jump in here and ask for a feature. This also gives a clear idea what people want from pharo, old and new users. Whether a developer will jump in and implement the feature is a completely different matter. After all that's the beauty of a truly democratic system. ________________________________ From: Igor Stasenko <siguctua@gmail.com> To: Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr; dimitris chloupis <thekilon@yahoo.co.uk> Sent: Saturday, 1 December 2012, 0:06 Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] Vim Keys? On 30 November 2012 20:25, dimitris chloupis <thekilon@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Even though I agree with your Igor , text editing is not per se required by existing smalltalk users, though even that is debatable, introducing vim and emacs mapping, in a completely optional state, will be definitely a motivation for vim and emacs user to join pharo. For example if you enter the pharo channel in irc you will be happy to find one person talking to himself, squeak channel more or less the same. Both #emacs and #vim show how popular both of these text editors are, why not pharo attract that crowd. Let me throw a crazy idea on the table why smalltalk cannot be a more ultimate text editor than those. Sure its ton of work and definetly you or I should not do , but I am sure if we provide minimum means of people to do this we will see more and more people porting vim and emacs features to pharo.
i am not against it. I just a bit tired of seeing this recurring topic appear again and again and no action. Come on, people. Pharo is open-source project. If you need it so badly, then do it. Don't wait till someone, one day do it for you, and stop wasting time, repeating same arguments over and over again, how good vi/emacs mappings are comparing to what we having now.
Also your point that we dont need text editing that much in pharo , is vaild from one side, however you should not forget that even though vim and emacs might appear radically diffirent from pharo those diffirences are skin deep. All of them have IDE tools , code navigation tools, debuging tools etc ... so I am not that convinced that for example using system browsers via shortcuts cannot be improved.
it can and should be improved. Absolutely. But pharo environment is much more than text editing, and so, asking if it can provide "vi mapping" to me sounds similar to "can photoshop provide vi/emacs mapping" , i.e. makes no sense at all. apart from this is implementing a full-fledged text editor/word processor: it is doable and been done before (like Sophie project did). But this is completely orthogonal to IDE: i simply do not see how shortcuts like making text "bold" or "italic" could significantly improve my daily coding experience. For coding i concerned about completely different things: code navigation, browser etc.. And here is where shortcuts come in handy.. Now if someone tell me how "senders of it" action shortcut (to browse senders of selector) which i often using by pressing 'Cmd-n' can be ton times more convenient to use, once we will use vi shortcut for it (btw, what is default vi shortcut for such action?)... i am all ears.
I am actually in the process of learning elisp code to port some of the features of emacs to pharo.
-- Best regards, Igor Stasenko.