On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 12:19:51PM -0400, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 07:16:55PM -0700, Isaac Dunham wrote:
> > On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 04:54:53PM +0200, Laurent Bercot wrote:
> > > On 27/05/2015 12:12, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> > > >I'm in the process of writing (yet) a(nother) editor and output formatter,
> > > >and on reading this, I started to wonder -- just how could one separate
> > > >a command-line version from the UI? I can see that the output
> > > >formatter can be so separated (and very usefully), but the actual
> > > >editing?
> > >
> > > Maybe I'm misunderstanding the question, as I'm unfamiliar with the
> > > internal of editors. But IIUC, an editor is, by definition, a user
> > > interface, so the command-line / UI separation looks impossible or
> > > irrelevant to me here.
> > > However, there are still some separations that you can perform when
> > > designing an editor. Right off the top of my head:
> > > - Core functions vs. actual interface, which could be terminal-based
> > > or X-based. Think vim vs. gvim, or emacs -nw.
> > > - programmable editor commands vs. interface to enter those commands.
> > > Think the sed engine in vi, or the LISP engine in emacs.
> > >
> > > If you factor your work correctly, it should be trivial for a program
> > > to get access to your editor commands via a library function call - and
> > > you can make a command-line tool to wrap useful calls. Also, there could
> >
> > nvi (the Berkeley rewrite of vi, after abandoning their first version)
> > uses a shared backend (vi-ipc) connected to the frontend via pipe().
> > There are about four frontends: terminfo-based (curses was derived
> > from the code for this), tk, motif, and gtk.
> > I ended up finding out this as a result of making the motif frontend
> > build/work again.
>
> Thanks. I should probably look into that. It might be illumination.
> Which version of the code or inteernal documentation should I be
> looking for? And where?

I think what I used was http://repo.or.cz/w/nvi.git, and the vi-ipc code
is in ipc/.
However, I'm not seeing much of anything by way of documentation.

HTH,
Isaac Dunham