LinLog

Authors note: Here's yet another installment of "From the Archives".  Clearly I haven't really felt like coming up with new ideas lately.  I blame the pandemic.  Seriously - I'm not going to be back in the office until at least next summer.  Even though restrictions have eased (at least for the time being), lock-down fatigue has definitely long since set in.

At any rate, this is another one on using Komodo with Vim emulation.  This was written on April 16, 2014, just a few days after the last one on the same topic.  These days I'm using Vim all the time, so none of this is relevant to me anymore.  However, it is a nice example of how it's possible to extend a good IDE to customize your workflow.

In this case Komodo is (or was) customizable using JavaScript, which is nice - lots of people know JavaScript.  The down side is that, to do actually useful thing, you also it also used XUL and SciMoz, the Mozilla Scintilla binding.  These are less commonly known, to put it mildly.

To be fair, Vim isn't much better on this score.  While it supports multiple scripting languages, the primary one is, of course, VimScript, which is...not a great language.  However, it's also quite old, quite well documented, and there are lots of examples of how to use it.  The VimScript API is also pretty stable, as opposed to Komodo, which was in the process of moving away from the XUL-based stuff when I stopped using it.  And really, a little VimScript will actually take you farther than you think.

In any event, I guess the idea is that it's good to know how to customize your editor, at least a little.  You know, sharpening the saw, knowing your tools, and all that.  Good stuff.  Enjoy!

Since upgrading to Komodo IDE, I've been looking a little more at customizing my development environment.  This is actually made somewhat easier by Komodo's "sync" feature, which will synchronize things like color schemes, key bindings, etc. between IDE instances via ActiveState's cloud.

Anyway, as part of this I've also been looking more at the Vim keybindings.  I've been a casual Vim user for a very long time, but I was never hard-core enough to do things like stop using the arrow keys or give up using ctrl+C and ctrl+V for copy and paste.  So now I'm trying to do just that.

Of course, Komodo's VI emulation mode is a pale imitation of what's available in Vim.  However, even that pale imitation is actually pretty good.  In fact, its even better than Komodo's documentation would lead you to believe.  In addition to the basic modal editing stuff, Komodo supports a decent range of movement commands, variants of change and delete commands, etc.  Basically, it supports everything I already knew about plus a lot more.  So now I'm trying to get that extra stuff into my muscle memory.

In the course of looking at some Vim command guides, I naturally came across some handy looking commands that Komodo didn't support.  So I'm going to try to fix that.

The first one is the reg command.  Vim's registers were something I hadn't really worked with before, but it turns out that they're not only pretty cool, but that Komodo actually has some support for them.  I only know this because the documentation mentions the key binding for the "set register" command.  However, it doesn't implement the reg command, so you can't actually see what's in any of those registers.

So, long story short, I fixed that with a macro.  Just create a new macro named "reg" in your "Vi Commands" folder in your toolbox and add the following code (this requires another macro, executed at start-up, containing the "append_to_command_output_window" function lifted from here):

var viCommandDetails = Components.classes['@activestate.com/koViCommandDetail;1'].
                                getService(Components.interfaces.koIViCommandDetail);
var count = new Object();
var args = viCommandDetails.getArguments(count);

append_to_command_output_window('');
append_to_command_output_window("--- Registers ---");

for (item in gVimController._registers) {
    if (args.length > 0 && args.indexOf(item) < 0) {
        continue;
    }
    if (typeof gVimController._registers[item] !== 'undefined') {
        append_to_command_output_window('"' + item + '   ' + gVimController._registers[item].trimRight());
    }
}

This allows you to type ":reg" and get a list of the current registers in the "command output" window in the bottom pane.

Another good one:

var scimoz = ko.views.manager.currentView.scimoz;
if (scimoz.selText.length == 0) {
    ko.commands.doCommand('cmd_vim_cancel');
} else {
    ko.commands.doCommand('cmd_copy');
}

This can be bound to ctrl+C and allow you to keep the default "copy text" behavior when there is text selected, and still work for Vim's "back to normal mode" when nothing is selected.