trogdoro's comments

Hey! Project creator here! I'll answer all your questions here and try and clear up the writing. Ask away.

Thanks! :)

I posted this on the blog itself, but re-mentioning it here... I've been evolving Xiki for over 10 years to do be a language for doing this kind of thing. The ideas is you can interact with trees and other nested structures (file paths, dbs, general UI's) from your text editor, using a simple plaintext representation, but in a GUI-like manner.

I've done talks about Xiki at RubyConf, Strange Loop, and QCon. Here's a quick 3 minute video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUR_eUVcABg. I'm doing a Kickstarter campaign soon, to bring Xiki support to vim, sublime, and possibly other text editors!

Shows oscilliscope-like output from a microphone... woah. In other parts of the video he steps through a dsl that controls the LED, and it shows the code and controls the arduino as he scrolls through with his mouse. Check out 3:27, 3:57, 4:55, and 6:47.

Much of Xiki has recently been extracted out into the 'xiki' shell command though. So when the vim Xiki client works, a lot of stuff will work (most of the menus). It just needs to grab the path based on where the cursor is, pass it to the 'xiki' shell command, and insert the results into the vim window (indented 2 spaces lower).

If any vim user in the bay area are interested in getting together and pair programming on knocking this out, ping me on twitter! The current vim xiki proof of concept uses the vim ruby api, which is actually pretty decent.

If you're on a Mac, you install AquaMacs which is very mac-like (shift-arrow-key to select, type to replace, etc.) and doesn't require emacs skills.

Another option is for vim people is Viper mode, which emulates vim from inside emacs (a lot of people like it apparently).

Related note, I was pairing with someone on Monday at Proto Night (protonight.com) and we got a very simple TextMate xiki client mostly working.

Getting ready to jump on a train, but I'll try to pop in in a bit.

Hmm, I just got it running in a VM on 12.04 a few days ago. I'll try it again.

Cmd-return "launches" whatever line the cursor is on. It's analogous to what return does in a shell console. Ctrl-return and double-clicking do the same thing.

When you launch a $... shell command it executes it and inserts the results. When you launch a url, it opens it in the browser. When you launch a dir path it lets you navigate the dir contents, etc.

I saw a screencast of that lately. Pretty awesome stuff.

You can type to narrow down after running anything. And its all just text so you can delete whatever you want, to narrow down the output (not practical on most shell consoles).

Never used MPW nor seen it in action, but many people have told me there are similarities. Being able to type stuff and double-click on it, I think.

I'm working on making a page that highlights similarities between Xiki and various tools / paradigms.

Hadn't seen TermKit. Looks pretty sharp!

> I have it installed on both and the command xiki-status returns "running"

That looks promising. Does like "xiki ip" work?

> the instructions are not helpful

Definitely upgrade so you get the latest gem, as the instructions have been updated lately. If you're still seeing errors join the google group (groups.google.com/group/xiki) and we'll get it figured out!

Yeah, totally. Someone should do that. I've brainstormed about it with a few XCode savvy friends. It would be super-slick if it were integrated into the Finder windows. So, you could drill into the dirs to get to a Xiki menu, and then drill into the Xiki menus in-place right in the OS.

I just made a Shoes menu (shoesrb.com) yesterday, though it's not checked in yet. Clicking Xiki menus that bring up custom native UI windows seems like it could have a lot of potential, though haven't really explored it. Might be interesting to try a shoes native interface for Xiki menus.

Another possible direction... Xiki has a web interface that you can enable. So you can to http://xiki and navigate menus. It probably wouldn't be too tough to make a native OSX app with an embedded browser that displays it.

I've been aware of Org Mode for a while. It's very slick. Sort of different philosophy but a few similarities (textual syntax for nesting / running commands, etc.).

There are other screencasts on xiki.org/screencasts that go into detail about specific scenarios. Some of them are a little out of date but the general idea is till the same. The one on web development is decent but needs an update. More screencasts to come soon.

I've gotten similar feedback, re imagining what it would be used for. The simplest use case is probably the "shell terminal but better" one. You can narrow down the output of shell commands, and make reusable files with notes as you run stuff (for yourself to use later on, or for other people). You can nest the commands underneath directory paths to avoid having to CD. You can change parts of the paths to re-run the same commands in a parallel dir structure in a different place (even a remote server). You can search command history in a specific dir and re-run commands (vs bash history showing you commands that were run in any dir). You can post any notes you made on the web or email them to people, for others to help others get started using stuff.

Going a bit higher-level, Xiki sort of lets you have "paths" (kind of analogous to url's) for many different things - database records, running commands in specific dirs, running a line of javascript in your browser, changing the style of a div, firing off a button click on a web page given its id, running unit tests, showing runnable (and modifiable) example code for various frameworks, etc. Most people probably agree that having paths for files and web pages is pretty useful. Having paths to other things can be useful for many of the same reasons.

I didn't post it this time:)

Join the Xiki google group and we'll get your problems fixed! The install has been tested on Lion and the latest Ubuntu and there are some reports of success. A few weeks back we shifted gears to get "gem install xiki" working and improve the install process.

It's github.com/trogdoro/xiki (under "Code").

Or you can do "gem install xiki" and it will guide you through setting it up.

Hmm, bummer. :( Join the google group and send the details. We'll get it fixed. http://groups.google.com/group/xiki

People have mentioned similarities with Smalltalk and other tools. If you know of a good screencast or something else that shows demos the Acme stuff it would be awesome if you could post the link in the comments.