Yi

I thought it might make sense to have a page where I can dump all my Yi related findings, rather than making tidbit posts about Yi.
See posts tagged ‘Yi’.
(NOTE: 22/09/14: I haven’t taken the time to really look into Yi as intensely as I have been earlier. Some of the info below may be out of date. Feel free to email me, richard.goulter@gmail.com).

My impression of Yi hasn’t altered much, and I think maybe Yi isn’t as Emacs as Emacs, or as Vim as Vim, and perhaps the code is limited by that.

It also seems that to work on Yi, one would need to get familiar with its eDSL, as well as having familiarity with the lens library.

From a Vim Perspective

Using the name “Vim” can either refer to the Vim program itself, or maybe even to the family of vim-emulators which try to emulate Vim behaviour.
Often the latter are very second class.

Also inevitable is the vim emulators will miss out on some features of Vim. Vim also has the quality of having many cool mechanics which many of its users mightn’t have heard about.

I suppose if Yi is easy enough to extend, these things shouldn’t be hard to include.
Some things which are missing in Yi from Vim are posted in the Yi repo’s issues, although many of these may refer to the now removed Vim keymap, rather than ethercrow/Dmitry Ivanov’s Vim2 keymap. See here.

Editing More Than One File

:ls will show a list of currently open buffers, and :buffer # will go to that buffer number.

But there isn’t a :bnext, :bprev which my muscle memory uses.
(One could add this, right, but I wouldn’t know how [See below], as of 2014-07-02).

I’ve not used arglist much, but as a mutable subset of buffers list, I’ve heard it’s an improvement over aforementioned commands. (That, and some more).
There’s a VimCast on it.
Not that I can complain (since I haven’t used it in Vim), but also not in the keymap.

Line Numbers

By default Vim doesn’t have line numbers on, and to get line numbers on Emacs is kindof hackish, I hear.
Maybe it’s because of the Emacs crowd, but it’s not clear to me how to get line numbers on Yi. (as of 2014-07-02).

I haven’t seen any screenshot of Yi with line numbers.

Visual Mode

One of the cool things about Visual mode is the insertion/appending on multiple lines.
See the vim docs. The vim wiki has some examples.
Yi now does this better than Vim (as far as I can tell); where Vim only has this multi-line insert for block mode, Yi supports the feature for linewise visual mode as well. And, Yi’s multi-cursor insert writes things “live”, whereas Vim’s is delayed. Brag. (The caveat is that Yi’s block mode is slightly different. In theory it ought to work for standard visual mode, I suppose; examine the diff of that commit to see how, but like, visual mode seems to be for other things).

That Yi’s Vim keymap supports multiple cursors like this implies a multiple cursors feature are supported out-of-the-box (which doesn’t appear to be the case with a grok at the source), or that it should be reasonably straightforward to add a plugin like terryma/vim-multiple-cursors (in the style of Sublime Text).

I took a screenshot of Vim and of Yi for comparison about what their Visual Lines modes look like:

Vim

Yi

Using this Yi.hs with Vty frontend (terminal), in a terminal with Solarized colors theme.

Command-line Window

This really shoots at “obscure Vim things”, but I’m making a list of differences I’ve noticed. This is the q:, q/, q? window which shows up. Vimdoc:cmdline-window.

(But I’m not sure how commonly this feature is used by Vim folk).

Quickfix Window

Quickfix is not an obscure feature of Vim. (Though I don’t use it as often as I should). I’m not sure what Yi’s support for Quickfix, or equivalent, is; but I haven’t looked. (as of 2014-07-02). Vimdoc:quickfix.

Tags

Yi appears to have some support for tags, which I need to look into. (as of 2014-07-02).

Searching

Yi does have Incremental Searching, and it does this the way Emacs does, which is better than Vim.
That is, while typing the search, all things which match are highlighted, rather than just one entry.

Jumplist

Yi does appear to have C-I, C-O for navigating between cursor jumps.
The :ju Ex command to show the jumplist isn’t there.
The changelist (g;, g,) also doesn’t appear to be implemented. Vimdoc:jump-motions

I’ve also seen '. used for “jump to last edit”. Yi doesn’t have this.
Vimdoc:’.

Questions About Yi

• How to write in some extra function and bind it with a keymap?

  The sample user configs have an example of this. e.g. yi-contrib’s Amy.hs,

  myConfig = defaultCuaConfig {
      -- Keymap Configuration
      defaultKm = extendedCuaKeymapSet,
      ....
  }
  
  -- Add M-x (which is probably Alt-x on your system) to the default
  -- keyset, and have it launch our custom macro.
  extendedCuaKeymapSet = customizedCuaKeymapSet $
      choice [
          metaCh 'x' ?>>! helloWorld
      ]
  
  -- A custom macro
  helloWorld :: YiM ()
  helloWorld = withBuffer $ insertN "Hello, world!"

  Unfortunately, this is specifically for the CUA bindings. (Emacs, Vim don’t get the equivalent of customizedCuaKeymapSet).
  Fortunately, there are multiple ways to customize bindings for Vim. See some notes on this.

• How to add in some extra function and bind it to an Ex expression? (e.g. :helloWorld).

  For this example, :yi helloWorld will execute helloWorld :: YiM(). See Yi Ex command. Well. This worked for me when using a Simple config, and when publishAction is used. (publishAction "helloWorld" helloWorld was enough).
  For non-Simple configs, it’s not clear how to ‘publish’ an Action, and trying the same doesn’t work. What happens instead is Yi complains about helloWorld not being in scope. Yi.Eval mentions $HOME/.config/yi/local/Env.hs. Trying to put my helloWorld in here didn’t work for me.

  It appears that this only works for functions of type Yim(), as opposed to Int -> Yim() or so. (Or, if possible, it’s not as trivial as I’d hope). (as of 2014-07-08).

  If you really want to have an Ex command :helloWorld, then you need to implement an Ex command parser, and your code would look like:

          defaultKM = mkKeymapSet $ defVimConfig `override` \ super self -> super
              { vimExCommandParsers = myExCmdParsers ++ vimExCommandParsers super }

  where myExCmdParsers is of type [String -> Maybe ExCommand], something like [helloWorldEC.parser, ...]. While none of the samples have a custom Ex command, here’s a simple Hello World example.

• How can I modularise code I write to customize Yi? e.g. like “source extra-stuff.vim”

  The answer is not to just put it in ~/.config/yi, alongside yi.hs. Bummer. I asked about this on the Google group.

  UPDATE: (22/09/14): I recently got an email from a Siddhanathan Shanmugam who suggsted to me that dependencies could be put into ~/.config/yi/lib folder. This works very well. e.g. if we adapt the HelloWorld example above, we can put HelloWorld.hs in ~/.config/yi/lib/ and can import it from yi.hs. (Gist).
  I guess that’s a Dyre thing. Cool.

  Before learning that, the workaround was to try and cabalize some portion of the config, and add treat that like some other dependency..

  I was able to get my yi.hs to depend on a cabal project by doing:

      ~/github/yi/yi$ cabal sandbox add-source /path/to/dependency
      ~/github/yi/yi$ cabal install dependency-name

  where ~/github/yi/yi is the location of my Yi sandbox. (Well, I’ve opted to use a Cabal sandbox for my Yi to avoid Cabal Hell).
  When the dependency is updated, to register this with Yi I’d need to

      ~/github/yi/yi$ cabal build
      ~/github/yi/yi$ touch ~/.config/yi.hs

  i.e. get Cabal to rebuild its dependencies, and then ‘modify’ the yi.hs file so that Yi will re-compile (and thus know about the updated dependency). “dependency” here, btw, could mean things like plugin, or aspects of a yi.hs which you’d rather have split up into different .hs files.

  If there are many such dependencies for your yi.hs, it may make sense to have a cabal package like yi-config-rgoulter; if this acts as the ‘root’ of your yi dependencies, then it means you’d only need to deal with installing this package. (Well, and adding the sources for the other dependencies, but a package typically updates more often than it’s moved).

  At the extreme, you could have a one-liner yi.hs like:

      import Yi.Config.Rgoulter

  because of how Haskell’s packages work; the disadvantage of that is the need to constantly cabal build as it updates, in contrast to just having Yi recompile a modified yi.hs.

  I still need to investigate some more about development in such a dependency, especially with (say) a shared Cabal Sandbox.

• How to show a list of keybindings, or something else which can show me what Yi can do?

  Haven’t figured that out yet. (as of 2014-07-02).
  yi-editor/yi#504 touches upon this issue, with the suggestion of documenting the keybindings (since these don’t change at a pace as to make this too awful).
  Those with the programming bug, though, would rather have this done ‘automatically’.

Troubles with Yi

• For some reason, with this config, when I tried playing around with Vim macros, it didn’t go well.
  e.g. if I tried recording a macro by qt^x$xq, then print out this register t, what I get is t^xx$xx. (i.e. the keys appear to have been pressed twice). Something to look into. Not any more!.
  (By “look into”, I clearly meant, “try tests and report as a bug”..).

• Not particularly a bug, but: since Yi is Emacs-like, <Esc> is treated as the Meta key, and when (using a Vim keymap) in Insert mode, one presses Escape quickly followed by another letter (e.g. Escape, then j), it gets handled as <M-j> rather than <Esc>j.
  I imagine some people might take advantage of this to allow for different insert-mode inputs. (Probably using <Alt> as meta).
  I also imagine it’s possible to configure this behaviour in a yi.hs.

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