VER – Vim & Emacs in Ruby

Description

VER is a “text editor” in the tradition of Emacs, providing a whole environment
around your editing experience.
It also borrows heavily from Vim, most prominently modal editing and the
default keyboard map.
Finally, I also have to thank the TextMate developers and community, because we
are standing on their shoulders by reusing the syntax definitions and completion
routines as long as they are under an acceptable license (no code of TM is
used).

At the time of writing, around 140 different languages have syntax highlighting
and around 130 languages have extended capabilities like completion or automatic
indentation.

Dependencies

You will need to install tk if it isn’t on your system already.
Detailed installation instructions for all major platforms and more
information about Tcl/Tk are available at: Tcl/Tk Project

In an attempt to make VER available for all Ruby implementations, I wrote an
alternative for ruby-tk, called ffi-tk.
Eventually it should be available as a gem, but for now you can get the source
from manveru/ffi-tk on github
No compilation required.

Only a `gem install eventmachine` away:
Ruby/EventMachine library

Features

VER and ffi-tk are 100% (hopefully straightforward) Ruby.
Syntax highlighting for around 140 file types.
Intelligent indentation based on file type.
Automatic completion for words, lines, aspell, and more.
Integrated window management
Terminal emulator and console
Recursive fuzzy file finding
Recusive pattern grepping
Find and replace using oniguruma
Unlimited undo
In-buffer ruby evaluation, can also be used for text manipulation
CTags support
much more…

Installation

For Tcl/Tk there are various instructions available from
Tk Docs
VER only runs on Ruby 1.9.1+, but should run on any implementation conforming to
the corresponding specification because no C extensions are involved.

ArchLinux

pacman -S tcl tk ruby rubygems gem install ver

Configuration

At the time of writing, there are only a few options exposed.
Options can be changed in your ~/.config/ver/rc.rb where you can find a few
default settings already.
In earlier revisions of VER, options are often to subject change, so be aware
that at some point they might not work as expected anymore.
If options are deprecated or replaced, I will try to keep the configuration
working, but in early stages this is no priority.

Keymap

At the time of writing, only the vim keymap covers all features of VER and is
actively maintained.
We are searching for contributors that can provide keymaps for other editors.
To add a new keymap, put it under config/keymap/$name.rb and start VER with

ver -k $name

Where $name is a placeholder for the filename of the keymap you created.

Yet another editor?

A little bit of philosophy

After many years of being a code ninja, it became apparent to me that there
could be as many editors as there are developers.

It feels to me, like there are many useless religious wars going on around this
seemingly simple topic, there is the church of emacs, the cult of vi, and many
other groups that don’t have chosen how to call themselves yet.

I’m guilty myself of telling people what to use, without really considering what
the consequences of my actions are.

A text editor should not be treated like a religion.

For one, everybody should be given an objective overview over the choices out
there. Recently, Wikipedia seems to have taken over this role, so I won’t invest
much energy into this topic.

What I find really interesting, is that only very few people even think of
attempting to write their own editor.

Maybe I’m suffering from a severe case of NIH, but i want to give everybody a
chance to see what’s involved. You can write an equivalent of nano in a couple
of days, but how much does it take to improve on the concepts of the great
editors?

I won’t say it’s an easy task, it’s more in the spirit of a Jedis building their
own laser-sword, once you reach a good enough proficiency in programming it
should be good practice to build your own tools, and what tool is more to
writing programs than an editor?

It also has other benefits, teaching you new things about yourself and the way
you work.
You will learn more about the strengths and weaknesses your language.
The next time you curse your editor, you can make it better.

Background

I’ve used many editors over the years, and a lot of them have inspired me,
amongst them are Proton, JEdit, SciTE, Vim, Emacs, Nano, Gobby, GEdit, Kate…
However, Vim and Emacs can be considered the most prominent of the editors that
try to do much more than just editing text.

I’ve never had a big interest in IDEs, maybe because Ruby saves you from most of
the boilerplate that is usually associated with programming, and for most
dynamic languages they just don’t provide you that much.

Maybe, someday, VER will become for Ruby what Emacs is for Lisp.
I have very mixed feelings about that.

The name

I tried to come up with a short name, that would give credit to my biggest
inspirations.
There is not much more to it.

Thanks

I’d like to thank following people:

Aman Gupta and the folks in #eventmachine
Helping me and keeping me going crazy when I hit some weird C syntax.
Francis Cianfrocca
EventMachine, making evented programming fun and even profitable.
Julian Langschaedel
First user and contributor.
Pistos
Inspiration through Diakonos and patience testing just about anything I throw
at him.
Richard M. Stallman
Emacs
Yukihiro Matsumoto
Ruby, ruby-tk, and the knowledge that programmers can make a deep impact if
they are just persistent enough.

License

(The MIT License)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of
this software and associated documentation files (the ‘Software’), to deal in
the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to
use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of
the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so,
subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS
FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM,
DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE,
ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER
DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

lian/ver