Some things that are unclear:

1. on kickstarter page: "getting Xiki working in other text editors, like Sublime and Vim." on github: "It has a web interface, but runs best from a Xiki-enabled text editor"

What is a Xiki-enabled text-editor, i.e. what text editors does it support currently?

(FWIW I don't like web-based editors, so it is quite important that the text editor is a real application. I edit blogposts/wikipages with vim and git too, wherever possible, because I just have a feeling of uncertainty that if I press the wrong thing / click the wrong place by accident the browser will loose everything that I typed)

2. security?

If anything can be a command then what happens if I open a malicious file? Do I have to be careful where I click? What if they use Unicode tricks to disguise the command?

3. predictability

similar to #2: how can I know what will happen when I "run" something if commands can be in any place, and interact with anything? Is there a way to preview what the command would do, and what it would interact with?

4. can I install as non-root?

I want to use the system ruby, and I want to try xiki without installing anything as root (except system packages provided by the distribution). The instructions on the github readme are confusing: it shows the sudo instructions, and some rvm instructions, neither of which meet my simple requirements.

I tried running 'bundle --path vendor/bundle', but it failed with an error:

   Gem::Installer::ExtensionBuildError: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

    /usr/bin/ruby2.0 extconf.rb                                                                                                             
  mkmf.rb can't find header files for ruby at /usr/lib/ruby/include/ruby.h

  Gem files will remain installed in /tmp/xiki/vendor/bundle/ruby/2.0.0/gems/json-1.8.1 for inspection.                                       
  Results logged to /tmp/xiki/vendor/bundle/ruby/2.0.0/gems/json-1.8.1/ext/json/ext/generator/gem_make.out                                    
  An error occurred while installing json (1.8.1), and Bundler cannot continue.

5. why ruby?

I'm not a Ruby developer, but I might want to try Xiki. Or is Xiki intended only for Ruby developers? But see #4 for the troubles I run into, it currently looks like one needs to know how to debug Ruby's build system in order to run your application.