Re: jvim vs. vim 6

[Mike Fabian <mfabian@example.com>]

Martin Baehr <mbaehr@example.com> writes:

> On Tue, Oct 23, 2001 at 10:09:39AM +0200, Mike Fabian wrote:
> > I believe jvim had a direct canna interface which Vim 6.0 has not.
> > But jvim is based on Vim 3.x and there are so many new features in
> > Vim 6.0 that you probably don't want to use jvim anymore even though
> > a direct canna interface can be useful sometimes.
> 
> hmm, well, i am just a mere novice at inputting multibyte text
> so far i could not tell a difference between jvim and vim 6
> as far as input goes.
> what is this direct canna interface?

An interface to canna which does not use XIM but talks to the
cannaserver directly. This has the advantage that it works on the
Linux console as well, where you don't have X11 and therefore no XIM.

I have never tested jvim, but I heard that jvim has such a direct
canna interface, if yes it should be possible to do Japanese
input in jvim on the console as well (you need a Japanese console
terminal emulator like kon2 or jfbterm as well for that).

And, a direct canna interface can sometimes be more convenient
than using canna via kinput2.

For example, XEmacs has a direct canna interface which behaves
comparable to the "OnTheSpot" input style of XIM. "OnTheSpot"
is much more convenient than "OverTheSpot", but unfortunately
kterm supports only "OverTheSpot". kinput2/Canna can support
"OnTheSpot" as well, but most X11 applications don't. Only
Mozilla currently gets it "OnTheSpot" right. gvim 6.0 (the graphical
version of Vim 6.0) does "OnTheSpot" input as well, but it is
partly broken for Japanese. When "OnTheSpot" is enabled,
some features of kinput2/Canna are very difficult to use from gvim 6.0
(like the widening and narrowing of the henkan region, this works
but is invisible), some features cannot be used at all (e.g. kigou-mode,
recording words into the canna dictionaries). Therefore you
usually have to disable "OnTheSpot" with gvim again by using the
commandline option

     gvim --xim-preedit position

But then you are back to using "OverTheSpot" which is not quite as
nice as "OnTheSpot".

Nice pictures and examples explaining the 4 different input styles are
here:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/intl/input-method-spec.html

Nice animated pictures showing clearly the difference between
"OverTheSpot" and "OnTheSpot" are here:

http://www.mizi.com/kde/doc/onthespot/onthespot.html

scroll to the bottom of this page.

The direct canna interface of XEmacs not only behaves like "OnTheSpot"
it also has more convenient functions to record words into the canna
dictionaries and other useful features.

If an application has a direct canna interface, it does not
necessarily mean that it behaves like "OnTheSpot", for example
the direct canna interface of nvi-m17n (multilingual version of nvi),
behaves like "OverTheSpot". But nvi-m17n can be used for Japanese
input on the Linux console because of its direct canna interface.

I don't know about the quality of the direct canna interface of jvim.
If it were like the one of nvi-m17n, you would not loose much by using
XIM instead. If it were like the one of XEmacs, using XIM instead
would be less convenient.

-- 
Mike Fabian   <mfabian@example.com>   http://www.suse.de/~mfabian
睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。