Planet Geek

The Editor Wars... continue!

Geekitude

There's always a sort of tongue-in-cheek banter between boosters of Emacs (aka 'The One True Editor'), and 'vi', the old workhorse that it is. Note that 'vi' has pretty much been replaced by 'vim' (aka 'Vi - Improved!'), as the old version hadn't really been updated in 15+ years.

One of the weapons in this give and take was the vast number of plugins and tools and full-on applications people had written to run inside emacs. Ticket management, email clients, news readers... all written inside emacs. One of those was in a fact an IRC client, so Emacs users could chat online without ever exiting or switching away from their beloved editor.

On a lark, I went looking to see if someone had done the same for vim. Sure enough, VimIRC is a script for vim that... lets you connect and talk to IRC servers inside the vim environment. It's sort of painful actually watching conversations happen in editor buffers (you actually say something on channel by inserting a line into the buffer), but someone had fun doing it.

Posted by dbs at November 11, 2005 12:34 PM