1 Reply by sticks

  • sticks
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  • Registered: 2006-02-09
  • Posts: 19

Re: vi everywhere

Hi,
My latest request is to be able to use parts of vi everywhere in the IDE. My exact case is the Output Window. If I get a stream of output (say from unit tests) and want to find a particular bit of text, my instinct (now) is to just start searching with the handy '/' key. Which of course does not work. I get the old "Cannot currently modify" error and have to switch to Ctrl-F.

Would it be possible to extend (some of) the vi power to the other windows? (Output is really the only one I care about at this point.)

as always, thanks.

2 Reply by Jon_Symnum

  • Jon_Symnum
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  • Registered: 2006-01-20
  • Posts: 1,658

Re: vi everywhere

Enabling it for the Output window is possibly not very difficult. Internally, it's actually a text editor window. It is marked read-only by default, and marking it read-only disables any keys getting to it (and causes annoying popups), so I would have to disable that (I've done it under VS2005 for other kind of things). A possible side effect is that you might be able to actually modify the output text, in which case I should implement some kind of 'soft' read-only in the vi/vim core itself.

I'll research it and let you know what I find out.

I'll also probably need to offer a user setting to control this.

On the other hand, enabling it in other windows (project explorer, etc...) would be neat but a whole lot of work, and I'm not sure it would be very intuitive.

Thanks for the suggestion.