Although this is not much related to KDE, or at all in fact, I decided to post it on my KDE development blog simply because there are so many KDE (and other) developers using Vim as their main (and only) IDE.

As I said earlier, I am a Vim fan, and I can not see that it will change in the foreseeable future. But, I have to say that, although I don’t find it a complete replacement of Vim’s Project plugin, that Quick Browser of Qt Creator is a very nifty feature.

So, I decided to start writing a Vim script which will emulate the Quick Browser behaviour. And so it started. The first version was a proof of concept one and it was designed so that the quick browser showed its results in a side panel (just as the Project plugin does).

And it worked quite fast.

The problem was that the Project, Code Navigator and my Quick Browser couldn’t work together very well - each one wanted it’s own window/buffer. So, I decided to start writing a simple Python (yes, Vim now supports Python scripting) framework that allows multiple plugins (called runners - took the name from Plasma/KRunner and I’m not ashamed) which are based on that framework to work together in harmony.

The project waits approval at SourceForge under the name Vide (obviously short for Vim - IDE). Currently only Quick Browser runner exists, but I’ll add more later.

Project management

And, that’s not all. There will be project meta-data which will allow you to define different build tools (cmake and qmake come to mind), …, and everything else I come up with… Since I’m bored and have to take my dog for a walk, this is all for now. So stay tuned.