Some more info on netbeans: I got this back from Xavier de Gaye, the author of Clewn. "Clewn pretends to be an IDE and controls gvim: open files, highlight lines and even do some buffer editing for the watched variables window and assembly buffers.
The [intepret Vim's responses in a way that makes sense to gdb] part is achieved through key bindings and therefore gives a limited (but sufficient) mean to control gdb from gvim: you can go 'up' one frame but you can't go 'up N' frames with a key. For gdb commands that are not used very often or very elaborate, you type them in clewn itself." So, as I see it gVim (console vim doesn't include netbeans at this stage) has a well defined, socket based protocol for interacting with an IDE. Originally this was used in conjunction with Java Netbeans to let you use gVim instead of the regular editor. Part of that interface lets an external program modify Vim buffers, and buffer updates can be sent from gVim to the other end of the protocol. I think that it is worth looking harder at the gVim netbeans interface (I'll probably rip Clewn apart until I understand how it works). If Netbeans is strong enough - and it ought to be, a GDB frontend uses it - then we may be able to significantly reduce the workload & remove the need for a Perl module 1) Implement Netbeans communications in Common Lisp (Hmm, what socket lib to use?) 2) Port some/all of slime.el to Common Lisp,integrate it with the Swank backend & make it talk to vim via the Netbeans interface. 3) There is no reason not to also keep the Swank port open. Does this make sense? At the moment the Swank backend is in CL and really quite dumb, just talking over a socket to Slime. Slime is the smarts, and also the editor interface. If we move the smart parts of Slime to reside on the backend, and change the editor interface to Netbeans then we are more or less done. I don't know if this is a reasonable idea yet, but if it is then maybe we should ask the Slime guys what they think. Emacs also supports Netbeans, assuming no loss of functionality, Slime could possibly support Vim and Emacs via Netbeans. Cheers Brad _______________________________________________ Gardeners mailing list [email protected] http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners
