Vim on Cloud9 IDE | Hacker News Reader

Vim on Cloud9 IDE

cloud9ide.posterous.com

103 pointssergimansilla23 comments

Cloud9 IDE now supports Vim keybindings!

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?

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.

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.

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.

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!

jj is another good remap for Esc.

    :imap jj <Esc>

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

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

I've never used Cloud9 before, but that just worked for me on a Xubuntu VM. As a Vim fanboy, I'll be giving it a shot.

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.

Yep - That last error is the real problem i've had each time.

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.

> 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.

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.

"Error. require.paths is removed" is what i get even when i follow your instructions exact. I had the same problem on Linux but im on Windows now. I dont think this is a Windows problem though? Something with the way i have things configured maybe?

PS. I used Win-Git for the git clone

Did you ask for help in our support page or on Github issues? We try to be very responsive. What problem are you having exactly?

Thanks for replying. Yes, i did visit the issues page on Github and it seemed others were experiencing a similar issue, and there was talk about changing the paths in some of the .js files, but i lost track of which file paths needed changing to what.

I've just doing a fresh install of the back of a git clone in a clean dir and get "Error. require.paths is removed" upon doing 'Node bin/cloud9.js'

This seems to be a Node 0.6 issue. We're almost done adapting Cloud9IDE to run on Node 0.6. For the time being please use the node version that is packaged with Cloud9IDE. (Run the shell script bin/cloud9.sh)

I also had a problem getting it to run according to the install/config/run instructions.

I am thinking about having Cloud9 set up for you automatically on my new CoffeeScript/SSJS servers (thanks to Trevor Burnham for the idea of having an editor).. if that is something that anyone might be interested in.

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

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