[Gardeners] Slim-vim (nee Slimpl) project status, April 2006

[Larry Clapp]

Hello, List,

Last month I announced that Jim Bailey had linked Embeddable Common
Lisp (ECL) with Vim, and that the Slimpl project had abandoned (or at
least put on hold) the Perl module to talk to Swank.

Since then, several things have happened.

* Jim Bailey, Eirik Nygaard, and I have all put up publicly available
  Darcs repositories with the patched Vim source.  See
  http://wiki.alu.org/Slim-Vim-Repos .
* We voted to shut down the old mailing list (slimpl at lispniks.com) and
  opened a new one (slim-vim at lispniks.com) with a name more in line
  with the project goals.  A minor thing, admittedly, but better now
  than later.  Slim-vim currently has 25 subscribers.  See
  http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/slim-vim .
* I released ecl-repl.vim, which provides a primitive ECL REPL within
  Vim, and Vim keyboard mappings to talk to it.  ecl-repl.vim
  replicates much of the functionality of VILisp (and fixes some
  long-standing bugs in it), all within Vim.  See
  http://www.lispniks.com/pipermail/slim-vim/2006-March/000034.html .
* Brad Beveridge has compiled Vim+ECL on Mac OSX/Intel (I think; maybe
  it was only ECL).
* I've compiled Vim+ECL on Windows/Cygwin.

In the coming months, we want to take slime.el and get it to run in
ECL in Vim.  Ideally, we won't have to alter slime.el very much, but I
suspect that that dream won't come true; slime.el has a lot of
Emacs-specific code wrapped up in it (oddly enough ;).  So we've
sketched the beginning of an architecture that will allow us to
separate Slime into a front end and a back end; the back end will talk
to Swank, and the front end will talk to the editor.  In parallel with
that, we'll write a front-end for Vim.

We have yet to contact the Slime developers about any of this.  We
wanted to have some actual code to bring to the table, and also some
architectural ideas that would benefit the Slime code base even
without considering a Vim interface.

Please feel free to join the Slim-Vim list to discuss the project, or
ask questions here.

-- Larry Clapp
   Slim-Vim project champion