This is the third time I've heard mumblings about a vimwiki. Who makes
the final decision about which of our great ideas to implement? Will
this system exist de jure or de facto? IOW will Bram bless something, or
will the semi-official Vim wiki be the first one to be steps up and
hosted by somebody?

On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 04:07:51PM -0700, Ian Tegebo wrote:
> It's fun to dream!  I'm serious about getting the helpfiles imported
> into the Wiki though.  I know about the VimDoc project; I think this
> could be the next evolution in that direction.
> 
> http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/usr_toc.html

I've been thinking of something similar, but perhaps critically
different:

Rather than "importing" the vim help files into existing wiki software,
what if one were to create a wiki system that acts simply as an HTML
view onto vimhelp-formatted files. (These act already as hypertext
documents.) Then, we make the source vimhelp files available on the web
using a distributed SCM like Mercurial.

Advantages:

 - Everyone may 'hg pull' to retrieve and maintain their own copy of the
   vimwiki, which becomes browsable through vim, for offline use and
   updates.

   - Further, when using vimhelp, if you notice a bug there's no
     "browser window" step. You just edit the file to fix it, then punch
     a key to "hg push" or something.

 - That each person has their own copy makes it possible to do personal
   annotations to vimhelp.
   
 - Contributions may be managed or reviewed prior to inclusion in the
   "official" wiki, but there may also be many with moderator
   privledges.
   
 - Even if your suggestion doesn't make it into the official version,
   your own copy may keep your changes while merging in other updates.

Disadvantages:

 - You've got to be a Mercurial wizard to accomplish some of those use
   cases (though the pain could be eased with vimscripts added to
   vimhelp)
 
 - No through-the-web editing (though that could be changed with some effort)

 - Vimhelp syntax is different than typical wiki syntax

I don't use Mercurial often so I may be misrepresenting it. Can someone
comment? Is this idea possible?

-Mike

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