[Vimoutliner] I had no idea how popular VO was

[Steve Litt]

On Saturday 04 August 2007 03:53, Aitor Pérez Iturri wrote:
> El Fri, 3 Aug 2007 12:02:13 -0400
> Steve Litt <slitt at troubleshooters.com> escribió
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I had no idea how popular VO is, figuring its usage was restricted to
> > the people on this list. Wrong!
> >
> > A Google search of VimOutliner finds about 26,900 mentions of
> > VimOutliner. 26,900!
> >
> > And many of these mentions are VERY complimentary:
> >
> > http://wiki.43folders.com/index.php/VimOutliner
> > http://www.billpowellisalive.com/2007/01/vimoutliner-and-a-tweak-to-use-c
> >olorschemes/
> >
> > There are VO packages for Gentoo, Ubuntu and Debian.
> >
> > Cool!
>
> I'm building a VO extension to manage GoboLinux recipes directly
> from an VO file. I personality found VO very useful.
> Greets.
>
> Aitor Pérez Iturri

If you like the GoboLinux philosophy, you might want to take a look at the 
ancient VimOutliner, either 0.20 or 0.1.3, the infamous "collapses under the 
root instead of on top of it" user interface. These ancient versions were 
built to be dropped into their own directory tree. They did not require 
knowledge of other apps, except for the vimoutliner.conf file, which 
contained paths to Vim and a few other things. More significantly, no other 
software required a knowledge of VimOutliner in order for VimOutliner to 
work. Ancient VO installed by a cp -Rp (plus editing a config file), and 
de-installed with an rm -rf command. This was accomplished by having all VO 
functionality run through a script called ol, which read vimoutliner.conf and 
set a bunch of environment vars which were used by the rest of the VO system.

Because of VO's strict filenaming policy, I don't think VO's modern practice 
of putting some VO installation in the vim tree is at all problematic, but in 
general I definitely understand the problems with the standard Linux 
packaging methods. At a client site, I once installed a new Perl and my Vim 
stopped working :-)

GoboLinux sounds interesting.

SteveT

Steve Litt
Author: Universal Troubleshooting Process books and courseware
http://www.troubleshooters.com/