Hacker News Reader

Comment by marmaduke | Hacker News Reader

I wanted to use Fossil but the division between what you do in CLI and what you do in the web UI was too arbitrary. I wanted to edit the wiki in vim, for example. Now I don’t care anymore and just use Git and GitHub

View on HN

Maybe I'm not understanding, but it's pretty easy to edit the wiki from the command line in vim (I've used text editors for it before).

https://fossil-scm.org/home/help?cmd=wiki

To edit a page, do an export and then a commit when you're done. It was easy enough to add this as a menu item in Emacs.

fossil wiki export foo.wiki foo.md

fossil wiki commit foo.wiki foo.md

You don't even need the temporary files:

    $ vim
    ...write, write, write...
    :w !fossil wiki create "The Foo Article" -
    :q!

Later:

    $ vim
    :r !fossil wiki export "The Foo Article" -
    ...write, write, write some more...
    :w !fossil wiki commit "The Foo Article" -

Wrapping all of that up into Vim macros would be a small matter for someone sufficiently interested.

Also, someone wanting to edit wiki-like docs in a text editor rather than in the web UI is probably going to find Fossil's embedded docs feature more useful anyway: https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/embeddeddoc.wiki

Good catch! I really did look for this when I tried to use it years back.

Yeah it's a bit bifurcated. Internally there's a lot of coupling -- HTML embedded directly in the C code and whatnot. This could be resolved if tools could be built on top of fossil, but the CLI code uses `exit` everywhere which makes it impossible to use as a library. I think they made an incomplete attempt at a JSON API, but what you really need is a proper linkable library like libgit2.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com