Ollie Rutherfurd's Weblog

Vimposter 0.0.5

I've just released version 0.0.5 of Vimposter. The changes from 0.0.4 aren't that major, but one noteworthy change is the caret now toggles between block and non-block when toggling between command and other modes. This change, along with a few others, was sent in by Matt Gilbert. It's a small thing, but it's really nice to have some visual indication of what mode you're in.

Progress on Vi Emulation Plugin for jEdit

After offering a bounty for someone to improve the Vimulator plugin for jEdit and getting no takers, I've started working on it. I haven't taken the bounty off the table, but I'll be doing that shortly.

I decided not to use Vimulator as a base, as I wanted support for repeating actions and repeating motions with actions. Vimulator maps specific key sequences to actions, for example dd to delete-line and dw to delete-word. Given that, I didn't see any easy way to make it work with sequences like 2d3w (delete 3 words, twice). I've take an approach of defining two types of commands: actions and motions. A motion is a command that can either move the caret or select text and move the caret, and can be used in combination with an action. If a motion is invoked not following an action it just moves the caret. If invoked following an action that takes a motion, it selects text. For example, "d" is an action that takes a motion. By itself it does nothing, but when you enter "dw" a word is selected then deleted. Both of these commands can take counts, for example, "d2w" would select two words then delete them.

At this point, I have command mode pretty functional, though many motion commands don't work exactly as the do in vi. For example, entering the sequence "deep" to swap two words won't end up swapping them correctly because of different views on what a word is, but hopefully those types of things won't be too big a nuisance to get right. Visual mode is functional, but missing lots of action mappings. Insert mode works pretty well, and I haven't really started on ex commands. I'm still not sure how much effort I want to put into them beyond basic ":e", ":q", etc... At a minimum, I want to be able to things like "d:$" (delete to end of the buffer).

I haven't released anything yet, as Vimposter (the plugin) is still very much in flux, but it's been stable enough that I've been able to use it while developing it. If you're interested in giving it a try, I've got the code in a Darcs repository here: http://www.rutherfurd.net/jEdit/plugins/vimposter/Vimposter/. A source download is available here: http://www.rutherfurd.net/jEdit/plugins/vimposter/Vimposter.tar.gz. If you're going to try the plugin, be aware that repeating actions (using the Action Bar) and macro recording while using Vimposter won't work. Also, smart-home and smart-end don't work properly in insert mode, and there are probably plenty of other little things like that.

Feedback and patches would be welcome.

Pranu's Got a Home Page and a Blog

My co-worker, Pranu Bhargava has a shiny new home page to go with his shiny new blog.

Andrea's got a Blog

My girlfriend, Andrea Prados, just started a blog. As her profile mentions, she's a Registered Nurse in a busy Washington, DC Emergency Department (aka ER). The blog, titled "ER Nurse", has been focused on nursing issues, advocacy, and the occasional quote from Marcus Aurelius. Give it a gander.

Breaking the Silence

It's been well over a year since my last entry, and a number of months since I updated the site at all. When I realized how long it'd been since I even uploaded anything, I resolved to at least upload jEdit stuff I've done in the past couple months and am now mostly up-to-date with that. I won't bother trying to play catch-up on the past 15 months.

I tore apart the Tags plugin and put it back together with support for VFS's. As I do all my work at work over SFTP, this is something I've wanted for a long time. I plan to add support for different types of searches next -- for example, partial, case-insensitive, regex, etc... and to decrease memory consumption for tag files opened over VFS's.
I've done a couple minor MoinMoin plugin releases.
I've changed the Accents plugin so it's not enabled by default. I've gotten totally sick of seeing posts to the http://community.jedit.org/, #jedit on irc.freenode.net, and mailing lists that "jEdit is broken", when people have just installed Accents it's doing exactly what it advertises it does.
I've begun work on a new jEdit Launcher, for Windows. However, I'm having a hell of a time getting motivated to finish it up. It still needs support for "-wait" and other new params, a GUI for settings, etc... but the total lack of interest and feedback I got was pretty discouraging. I guess it doesn't help that I've been busy with work, some contract work, and moving. I'll probably get back on it in a bit.
I've got some new macros to upload, but that's not going to happen today.

Post-Hurricane Link Roundup

Today, talk like a pirate:

http://www.talklikeapirate.com/piratehome.html
Shortest passwordless ssh tutorial, ever:

http://people.enginesofcreation.ie/mick/archives/000230.html
VoodooPad: a personal wiki.

http://www.flyingmeat.com/voodoopad.html
Spambayes Outlook Plugin rocks:

I get loads of spam sent to my work e-mail address, where I use Outlook. Since installing the Spambayes Outlook Plugin, it's become a non-issue. The spam is neatly tucked away into it's own little cubby, which I occasionally check on.

http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/windows.html

Things to Check Out

DocSync plugin, 1.0 beta, for jEdit is available here. Users Guide can be found here.

Article on Gentoo + BSD here.

A portupgrade article.

The Burning Edge, a Mozilla Firebird build blog.

A usenet troll detector: http://online.effbot.org/2003_08_01_archive.htm#troll

jEdit has a wiki.

Docutil DocBook XML Writer Updated

I finally got around to making some updates to the DocBook XML writer for Docutils this past weekend. The code and minimal docs can be found in the Docutils Sandbox here:

http://docutils.sourceforge.net/sandbox/oliverr/docbook/

Docinfo elements are the major missing/messed up piece, but most of it should work. I've used it to generate DocBook for the documentation for a couple of the jEdit plugins I maintain, and it worked just fine. Please give it a whirl and let me know what works or doesn't work for you.

Using Inkblots to Remember Passwords?

http://research.microsoft.com/displayArticle.aspx?id=417

A Short Essay on Writing Maintainable Code

http://advogato.com/article/258.html

Text to Speech Demo

http://www.research.att.com/projects/tts/demo.html

vb2py

This looks interesting: http://vb2py.sourceforge.net/.

rst2chm 0.1 released

rst2chm generates Microsoft (TM) HTML Help files from one or more reStructuredText source files. rst2chm requires Docutils and the Microsoft (TM) HTML Help Workshop

Browsing Revisions of a Subversion Repository

Below is an excerpt from a post [1] by Ben Collins-Sussman on how to view a specific revision of a Subversion repository.

...for the *moment* you can browse old revs with this form:

        http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/!svn/bc/2000/trunk

..but don't count on this always working.

For example, to view revision 5 of the following repository:

https://newtonsplace.net/svn/rst2chm/trunk

use the following URL:

https://newtonsplace.net/svn/rst2chm/!svn/bc/5/trunk

[1]	http://codespeak.net/pipermail/pypy-dev/attachments/3ee02216/attachment.eml