

Vim on Cloud9 IDE - sergimansilla
http://cloud9ide.posterous.com/vim-mode-for-advanced-editing-in-cloud9-ide
Cloud9 IDE now supports Vim keybindings!
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udp
I hope they can pull this off, because my experience with Vim emulation
plugins is they don't even come close to being Vim. Vim is so vast that
everyone has their own way of using it, and what one person might consider an
obscure feature could be essential for someone else (plus losing my .vimrc
would be like losing an arm).

I wonder if it would be possible to run Vim itself in a browser using
Emscripten or something?

~~~
lucian1900
Although not in a browser, I've found Emacs' Evil mode to be very good. It
even has sane buffer management. I've been using it for the past month or so.

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gexla
Of course, Vim mode isn't completely Vim mode without all the add-ons and
customizations we do. Depending on those additions, we may require things from
the environment of the underlying OS. Some of us may go even further and break
into scripting certain customizations. Vim is also open source.

The UI can replace some of those customizations, but that requires grabbing
the mouse. Light users of Vim may be interested, but it's not enough yet to
reel in the power users.

I do like the look and it renders great in my Linux browsers, which isn't the
case with much of the web out there. I'm intrigued enough to at least give it
a try.

~~~
Derbasti
That said, implementing all the basic movement commands and maybe some tag
navigation goes a long way towards making any source code editor more useful.

But I concur in that I would also demand macros, text objects and registers to
really make it delightful.

Frankly, though, most plugins I use could just as well be implemented as IDE
features. Refactoring stuff, project management, debugging... I would not mind
doing that the IDE way instead of the Vim way.

ViEmu (MSVC) comes pretty close to that. Vico is on a good way, too.

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jballanc
Very cool! Cloud9 is, IMHO, getting closer and closer to being a legitimate
choice for non-trivial development work. A few requests for this plugin,
though:

* Allow me to remap my keys...especially <esc>. I prefer to use <C-s> for <esc> since I don't like reaching with my pinky

* I like that ':' takes me to the console, but why does it _also_ enter a ':' character into the console? This means that executing a console command from the keyboard requires ':'+<backspace>+<command>...which kinda sucks

* Vimscript support? I realize this is completely non-trivial, but there are certain plugins that I simply cannot live without (yankring, for example...actually, just give me yankring and I'll forget about Vimscript support for now ;-)

Overall, though, I like what I see so far (you even implemented visual mode,
yay!). Keep up the good work!

~~~
danneu
jj is another good remap for Esc.

    
    
        :imap jj <Esc>

~~~
nicksergeant
I tend to use jj far too much, so I mapped <esc> to jk

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mcrittenden
Looks like lots of useful vim features are missing at this point. For example,
"ci(" and "df(" don't work. Hopefully it'll become more feature-complete in
the future.

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newston
I wanted to come here and complain how they published a buggy and incomplete
plugin. Then I remembered how I use vim keybindings for Chrome (Vimium). That
would be Vim (cloud9) inside Vim (Vimium), which is just wrong of course...

Now I can say, the vim mode in cloud9 is really usable. Good work, the only
thing I miss is a .webvimrc :)

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krmmalik
I'm genuinely very disappointed with Cloud9 IDE, and that so only because i
can never get it to install. I've tried it in both Linux and Windows
environments and for one reason or the other either the installation script
fails or the server.js file does, and resolving the file path issues and
dependency issues is a real nightmare.

~~~
drivebyacct2
Really? Last time I tried it, it was a git clone and executing one, maybe two
commands. I've seen very early unix beginners get it running quickly...

    
    
        sudo apt-get install libssl0.9.8
        git clone https://github.com/ajaxorg/cloud9.git cloud9
        ./cloud9/bin/cloud9.sh
    

(roughly) Yep, just tried in a clear dir, it's up and running with that alone.

~~~
maratd
Ok. Let's try that:

    
    
      support/node-builds-v4/node-linux64: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.0.9.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
    

Wait, what? Ahh, I have a newer version installed and it really wants the old
0.9.8. Let's fake the links and see what happens:

    
    
      ./cloud9/bin/cloud9.sh: line 11: 23557 Segmentation fault      support/node-builds-v4/node-linux64 bin/cloud9.js "$@" -a x-www-browser
    

Not good. Maybe I can try the node already installed on my system instead of
the bundled binaries? Sure, let's try that:

    
    
      Error: require.paths is removed. Use node_modules folders, or the NODE_PATH environment variable instead.
    

Right. Because it's not compatible with the latest stable version of NodeJS,
which is 0.6 ... that's what the guy was talking about. Unless you want to
setup a box with the exact dependencies that it needs and use it only for
that, it'll be a real pain.

~~~
drivebyacct2
Okay, I didn't know my node was a version behind, but are you really telling
me checking out node.js into another directory and building it is a "real
pain"?

Maybe beta quality open source software isn't something I'd recommend to you
then.

~~~
maratd
> Maybe beta quality open source software isn't something I'd recommend to you
> then.

Beta grade software isn't something I would recommend to anyone for the
purposes of writing production code. That doesn't mean it's not for everyone,
but it's certainly not for me.

~~~
drivebyacct2
What?

Now you're just playing word games to make me sound unreasonable. Unless
you're implying that Cloud9 is going to hack my GitHub account and somehow
wipe out my repository, I see no problem whatsoever using a beta text editor
to write code.

It's not like the "beta" aspect of the editor is going to slip in some weird
bug into the code I'm writing while I'm not looking.

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benatkin
The title is misleading. I thought they'd developed a vim plugin for
connecting to a Cloud9 project.

