Look -  if it comes up repeatedly in conversations, then hey, you know 
there just MIGHT be something there?

I'd argue it this way - the goal of an editor is to be able for users to 
edit documents, right? That's the verbatim definition of an editor. 

Now, there is a large class of documents that vim is NOT suited for - and 
that is structured documents, consisting of data fields. And unfortunately 
for vim, that is a huge portion of the data-entering world, and is getting 
larger by the day. And there is no good unix program for handling it.

So you have a large, unfilled use case here - where your goal is to not 
worry about the formatting, the editing, the keybindings - or anything 
associated with an editor - and where you want to only worry about the data 
and can manipulate that data via callbacks.

And yes, you are right, since vim didn't have something like this I ended 
up writing a custom solution. It sucks. I wrote it in 1500 lines of python 
using asciimatics when I could have done it within say 50 lines of python 
with a decent templating system and vim. Again, it royally sucks. 

I took about 3 days to write it when it could have taken - again - about 1 
hour or so with a decent templating system. And more to the point it looks 
less professional than it would have in vim. It doesn't leverage the large 
code base and I have to train people to use the arbitrary keybindings.

So yeah,  I definitely say that there is a use case for it here and if 
there are multiple conversations about it that come up from time to time 
I'd say that this just makes my point for me.

Ed


On Thursday, November 19, 2020 at 7:20:46 PM UTC-6 rwmit...@gmail.com wrote:

> This discussion comes up repeatedly (so shows using the conversation 
> search in google groups).
>
> One suggestion was to use a split panel.  One panel would have user 
> entered keywords and the other the combined document.  When saving the 
> keywords, a script would auto run to do the substitutions and then load the 
> results into the other panel. (well, that is how i interpreted the 
> suggestion)
>
> If your goal is to have them edit a document every 20 seconds, I really 
> can't imagine they'll be doing a lot of editing other than filling in the 
> required fields.
>
> If you plan on having multiple templates, the problem gets more involved 
> and so does the glue code to do the magic of manipulating fields to compute 
> new fields/values.
>
> Back in '88 I worked for a company that used something called Dataflex to 
> generate input forms for phone support to use when responding to customers. 
>  Ultimately you're probably looking at a custom solution.  It is amazing 
> how something can look simple on the outset but quickly becomes much more 
> involved.
>
>
> On Thursday, November 19, 2020 at 5:53:41 PM UTC-5 ruben...@my.liu.edu 
> wrote:
>
>> On 11/19/20 1:08 PM, hor...@gmail.com wrote: 
>> > You know, the more I'm thinking about it, the more I think vim needs an 
>> > internal templating system.  
>>
>> no it doesn't, so don't thnink about it so much. 
>>
>> vim is fine, if not already over built a little. 
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> So many immigrant groups have swept through our town 
>> that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological 
>> proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998 
>> http://www.mrbrklyn.com 
>>
>> DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002 
>> http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software 
>> http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources - Unpublished Archive 
>> http://www.coinhangout.com - coins! 
>> http://www.brooklyn-living.com 
>>
>> Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and and extermination camps, 
>> but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013 
>>
>

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