Yi

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About

Yi is a text editor written and extensible in Haskell. The goal of Yi is to provide a flexible, powerful and correct editor core dynamically scriptable in Haskell.

  • Yi is an haskell interpreter. Very much like emacs is a Lisp interpreter, this makes really easy to dynamically hack, experiment and modify Yi. All tools and goodies written in haskell are also readily available from the editor. This is implemented by binding to the GHC api.
  • Frontends. Yi can use either gtk2hs or vty as frontends, so users can choose their favourite interface.
  • "Emulation modes". The primary emulation modes for Yi are vim and emacs. Keybindings for vi, mg and nano and other are also provided. Other editor interfaces can be written by the user to extend Yi.

former Yi homepage: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/yi.html

Get Yi

"Stable" release on hackage:

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/pkg-list.html#cat:Editor

Development repo: 

darcs get --partial http://darcs.haskell.org/yi/

The obligatory screenshoot

Gtk frontend:

Yi-20070409.png

Vty frontend: (upcoming)

NEWS

(Recent items first)

  • Console buffer (old news)
  • Common buffer backend (across all frontends) (15:08, 2 June 2007 (UTC))
  • Overlays (thanks Ben Moseley)
  • per-buffer exentsible state (11:44, 28 May 2007 (UTC))
  • Synchronous keymaps: the behaviour of the keymap (ie. the underlying parser) can depend on the editor state.
  • Full-dynamic Yi
    • it's now possible to change any part of the Yi codebase and see the result with a mere 'M-x reconfigE' (take that, Steve Yegge :))
  • Yi is now hosted on darcs.haskell.org/yi
  • Dired mode (thanks Ben Moseley)
  • Yi 0.2 released!
  • Buffer-specific code is now contained in BufferM monad
  • Multiple marks per buffer
  • All keymaps use a unified mechanism! (and are therefore potentially composable)
  • Miniwindows for vty frontend
  • Miniwindows for GTK frontend
  • Basic support for query-replace (emacs)
  • Rudimentary support for indentation
  • Syntax highlighting in GTK frontend (using SourceView)
  • Completion for file names
  • Incremental search (emacs)
  • Completion for M-x, and buffer switch.
  • History for emacs mode minibuffer
  • New commands and keybindings can be defined easily and dynamically
  • Yi is an haskell interpreter!
    • Possibility to run editor actions interactively (similar to emacs M-x)
    • Configuration is just a haskell module exporting (yiMain :: Action)
  • Possibility to evaluate haskell expressions interactively.
  • New, unified way to define Keybindings
  • Vty frontend supports Haskell (lexical) syntax highlighting (thanks Stefan O'Rear)
  • GTK frontend works in Win32
  • GTK frontend (in addition of Vty frontend) (requires gtk>=0.9.10.4)
  • Linewrap support
  • Bugfixes in scrolling
  • Lots of simplifications in the cursor management
  • Keymaps can now process typed events instead of Chars (no extra decode step)
  • Yi.Debug added for debugging
  • Vty frontend replaces Curses frontend

Bugs

Check/report bug reports here:

Report bugs here: http://code.google.com/p/yi-editor/issues/list

http://code.google.com/p/yi-editor/issues/list?can=2&q=&sort=&colspec=ID+Type+Status+Priority+Milestone+Owner+Summary+Keymap+Frontend+Opened

How to Configure Yi

You can find configuration file examples here:

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/yi/examples/

A good start is to copy YiConfig.hs in your ~/.yi directory (create it if needed), and hack as needed.

To run the gtk frontend, use the "-fgtk" option.

Development plan

Also read: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/yi/TODO

Test suite

The test suite has to be made up to date and re-instated.

Build test: regular, gtk, and haddock html doc should be buildable at all times.

Refactorings

The below describes possible refactorings to investigate:

  • Merge yi-lib into the yi package.
  • Buffers

at the buffer level)

    • Duplicating Buffer functions at the Core level by wrapping them in withBuffer is ugly
  • Nail-down the last remnants of C
    • C-code don't belong to yi but to low-level libraries
  • Gtk should use the same syntax higlighting code as vty backend.

New features

Roughly by order of easy to do / reverse importance.

  • Window stuff
    • Add option to deactivate line-wrap (and truncate lines instead)
      • gtk: attribute textViewWrapMode
    • vty: horizontal scrolling
    • Independent window scrolling (without moving the Point)
  • Open multiple windows on a buffer (each with a different point)
  • cua mode
  • Buffers
    • Do Undo/Redo on the "interactive" transaction boundaries
    • Re-think the Buffer interface/implementation (so it supports unicode (utf8), better marks, etc.)
    • Re-write the FastBuffer so it uses ByteString (or something else) instead of directly the C pointers
      • Look at other possibilities for buffer storage; e.g. Simon Tatham has had success using lazily-constructed size-annotated 2-3-4 trees for editing >10GB files. [1]

Yi ideas

This section is meant to gather ideas people have for Yi.

Emacs

Coming from an Emacs background, I think a few things are essential, mainly the introspection capabilities of Emacs.

Emacs goodness

The following are things I like about Emacs, as an extensible environment, and miss in Yi:

Really good online documentation
Emacs can tell you a lot about a function or variable with a keypress--- the current value, where it is declared, and a hypertext formation string
Hooks-Extensibility
All (good) apps allow users to extend, through, e.g., hooks --- a list of functions that are run before/after some event (like saving a file)


Emacs badness

So, why replace it?:

ELisp
Dynamically scoped, Dynamically typed, ugly, old. 'Nuff said
What's a Parser?
A lot of apps in emacs do stuff with text, usually text that is in some language. There is no standard parser (like, e.g. parsec), so a lot of it is ugly handwritten spaghetti. This also means that adding analysis tools isn't really done (or done nicely).
ELisp again
Haskell is a lot cleaner to write, especially because of the large number of libraries.

Emacs maybeness (?)

Some things that are sometimes bad, sometimes good:

Everything is a buffer
Makes some sense, but sometimes doesn't. It is nice to have uniform key bindings do the right thing (e.g., C-Space sets the mark, and the region can then be used, e.g. to delete a sequence of emails in Wl) Sometimes, however, you just want some sort of GUI widget.
OTOH, having the minibuffer be a special kind of buffer is a good idea.
Properties
It is possible to associate arbitrary properties with symbols. This means you can annotate a symbol and then use that information at a later date

Vi ?

What about vi? I believe we want Yi to subsume vi as well.

Ideas

An extension to GHCi to support documentation of symbols.
This seems to be (reasonably) straightforward, as GHCi already has :info. It would mean hacking the type environment (what about values?) to add documentation information. The main problem would seem to be populating this --- maybe hack haddock to produce something from the library docs? I assume that using package GHC uses the parent RTS (package GHC seems to be the way to go, but more investigation is required --- don?)
Views on data
Rather than just editing a file, you would open a view onto the file, i.e. there is no longer a 1-1 correspondence between buffers and files. Why? Well, for aggregate buffers (i.e., editing multiple files in the one view), or for multiple views of a file (e.g. AST and source-level). There would be some primitive ops for editing a buffer (insertChar, delete, etc.), which would then call update functions on anything observing that file.
Remote attach so I can work from home, but still use a remote machine
Haddock documentation
(no brainer), maybe associate with .hi files for binaries.
A class MiniBufferRead (or PromptingRead) which allows the user to

invoke a function similar to M-x in Emacs, but without requiring (interactive)

This means that given f :: String -> Int -> Action, (makeInteractive f) :: Action would prompt the user for a String then an Int and run the corresponding action.
Maybe a class YiShow, which all config items must be a member of? This is to emulate describe-variable

Implementation

Considerations:

Configuration
Per mode/file/buffer/whatever Monads, or reload/recompile? Or some hybrid? How does this interact with the documentation aspects? Do we want to have separate sorts of symbols a la emacs (describe-function, describe-variable), or is everything a function? I would think that configuration info doesn't change that frequently --- is this globally true though?
We can probably use a GHCi-like "let". Rebinding a function would then be synonym to assign a variable, thereby achieve unification between functions and variables.
Also possible: use something similar to the GHCi debugger to "tune" the behavior of some functions.
Interface to the runtime
The scheduler, docs, etc.
Introspection of e.g. what processes are running.
There are already libraries in Haskell for processes, but they don't give Yi any extra information --- we really want a layer on top.

...

Sjw 09:15, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

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