Re: breaking with history ?

On 8 June 2013, Marc Weber <marco-oweber@gmx.de> wrote:
[...]
> I have written up a small list:
> http://vim-wiki.mawercer.de/wiki/vim-development/breaking-with-the-past.html
>
> But its not long enough to to justify a fork. Fixing is still the way
> to go IMHO.
>
> So if you have small things which "always bothered" you - which should
> be set differently by default, add them to the list. Also huge
> features are welcome :)

Personally I'd wish for a more consistent library of functions, and
for better docs, or at least a better indexing of the existing docs.

Examples: there are bufexists(), buflisted(), and bufloaded()
functions, but no bufactive(); there are getbufvar() and setbufvar(),
but no undefbufvar(); you can do let $ENV='val' and let $ENV='', but not
unlet $ENV; placing and unplacing signs require IDs, but you can't get a
list of the existing IDs; findfile() can take wildcards in the path
argument but not in the filename. And so on, and so forth; I'm pretty
sure everybody who ever wrote some VimL code has been driven up the wall
at some point or another by the absence of some "obvious" functions.

On the flip side, there are a number of options that should be
removed. Take f.i. 'magic'; this is pure evil: it's incomplete (you
can't set it to 'verymagic' or 'verynomagic'), yet it forces every
single script out there to handle it. Then 'lazyredraw', off by
default, no less: why is this an option to begin with?

About the docs, can you tell off the top of your head how can I get
to the list of functions gouped by category? To the list of operator
priorities? The list of exceptions? How do you even search for these?

As for what I'd do differently should the Vim project start from
scratch, I'd say that would be the GUI. There are a few Vim refugees
that switched to Sublime Text, read what they say about their
experience. It's enlightening, and they do make some unpleasant (to
most of us) but still valid points. Example of such a rant:

http://delvarworld.github.io/blog/2013/03/16/just-use-sublime-text/

Playing a little with Sublime Text might be inspiring, too.

/lcd

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