[ssivark]

I wonder about the point of torturing a minimalist text editor with no graphics support (such as Vim into a comprehensive development and visualization enviromment, by invoking several plugins and some very specific workflows. Would it not make more sense to take the interface (modal editing, etc) and wrap it into module that can be easily embedded into several different IDEs, to handle text-specific tasks? That way, there is a fully powered system that can handle all the other tasks that the text editor was never designed to handle!

[stewbrew]

Oh come on, they're talking about interacting with R. I hope you're aware that R is a simple interpreter and any IDE for R is mostly a window manager that arrangs views on the source code, the REPL, and the graphic display if available. Also: vim isn't vi. Vim isn't minimalist

[scrollaway]

That is one of the goals of neovim. And it's even being put to the test: The VSCode-vim team is indeed working on a neovim integration.

[kqr]

> Would it not make more sense to take the interface (modal editing, etc) and wrap it into module that can be easily embedded into several different IDEs, to handle text-specific tasks?

Absolutely would. The issue is that this is (evidently) a surprisingly hard problem. I say evidently because I dont know /why/ it is so hard, only that extremely few people have succeeded.

[flukus]

Alternately, would it make sense in R to separate the code and the result instead of a WYSIWYG approach? This is how many work with tools like latex/pdf (among others), edit the source in vim and have a viewer window open next to it.

[huac]

That's (sort of) how RMarkdown works.

[brian-armstrong]

)

[hatmatrix]

Can not Spacemacs + ESS fill the gap?

[kqr]

Or just Emacs in general. Emacs is practically a platform where you pick both language support and UI paradigm as plugins, rather than limiting yourself to one (Vim) or the other (regular IDE).