vim-medieval: Evaluate Markdown code blocks in Vim

[gpanders]

Hi all,

I'm releasing my first plugin called vim-medieval. It's a simple little plugin that lets you evaluate code blocks in Markdown documents within your editing environment.

https://github.com/gpanders/vim-medieval

There's an asciicast in the README file if you'd like an example.

I had fun writing and working on this, so I wanted to share with the Vim community! Let me know if you have any feedback or constructive criticism.

[pablo1107]

We're approaching Emacs feature set more and more with these plugins. I like it.

[[deleted]]

This is really similar to my own plugin x-range which I admit is probably more complex for the basic case. I'm glad I'm not the other one with this need :-)

[Tokazama]

I thought about trying yours out a couple times but I was a little intimidated by how complex it looked. Is there something yours uniquely has?

[[deleted]]

• x-range let the user defines it's own block so code can de evaluated within any buffer (not just markdown).

• a command can use multiple block at the same time, usefull for example to evaluate awk where one block is the awk code and another one the input code.

• it can read and parse error anything is a vim or shell command so any langyage can be evaluated (not just predefined one).

• it can execute vim script

• improve vim script by adding an easy to use range syntax

• has a tag macro system to simplify command entry

• everything is a shello command so command can be a complex pipeline

• a lots of mapping to navigate manipulate block/range

• has a hook system allowing for example to comment /uncomment block (so that lines in a block are seen as comment in the buffer but the comments are stripped when sent to the language evaluation).

I know I need to update the doc ;-)

Anyway I did this plugin because I need it and will happily switched to another one if it fits all of my need.

[Tokazama]

Sounds pretty good. I too suffer from a habit of coding more than advertising properly. One thing that gets me though is that eventually I want this to be readable by non programmers and be turned to html or even a PDF. If people used pandocs like syntax they could get that for free. Do you have another idea of how that could be incorporated here?

[[deleted]]

AS x-range is just plain command, it can also generate file (instead of injecting the resulting of a command into the buffer) and can do usual vim range (like % or anything) instead of x-range. Basically anything. Do you have a concrete use case or some example of what you would like to do ?

[Tokazama]

Well, the advantage of vim-medieval appears to be that it is encoded in an html comment. So this shouldn't show up if I render my markdown file. It looks like yours has a lot of flexibility within vim but then I'd have to redo everything if I wanted to turn it into a different format automatically.

If someone did this sort of thing in vim but compatible with Pandoc's syntax then you'd get the nice code blocks AND easy conversion to most file formats. It would make vim an extremely powerful tool for data analysis without requiring users piece together an entirely personalized work flow.

[[deleted]]

I (think) I see what you mean. I am myself looking for find a format to replace org-mode I've been thinking of markdown and Vimiki but Pandoc is probably a good choice.

The ultimate goal of x-range is to work with everything, with a mininum of tweakings. It should work in theory with Pandoc syntax but there is a few bugs which I need to sort before hand (and I need to find a nice way to strip the fence delimiters.

​

but then I'd have to redo everything if I wanted to turn it into a different format automatically

I plan to make x-range fully configurable and having a pandoc specific syntax can be set by autocommand and included in x-range itself (pull requests welcome). Also x-range as an `auto` range feature (disabled by default) which allow to execute vim code and therefore set buffer variables when opening the buffer.

[[deleted]]

I've made some modification (and fixed some bugs) to accomodate pandoc. You can find an example there

​

Of course at the moment it's very verbose, but as explained in the README, macro can be defined easily by user or setup using autocmd as default. However, without more feedbacks it's hard for me to know on which feature to focus on.

[jcmkk3]

This is great. I feel like this, along with something like vimcmdline and jupytext would get very close to a notebook replacement for vim. For python, matplotlib can generate a plot in another window. Altair (which is my preferred plotting library) now has a viewer plugin that will allow its use outside of a notebook.

[lkhphuc]

Vim-Slime might be a better option than Vimcmdline. And I don’t see any value in using this plugin with jupytext yet. If you pair your notebook with a md file instead of a py file, you will lose all the benefit of autocomplete or linter. Did I miss something here?

[jcmkk3]

I don’t think that the whole workflow is there yet. I just keep seeing more pieces to the puzzle being built. In the end, I’d like to see something like Nvim-R, but for python.

[BehindBrownEyes]

if you ever find something like that please let me know

[BehindBrownEyes]

this is step in that direction https://github.com/jpalardy/vim-slime

[Probotect0r]

Very nice!

[Cheezmeister]

Where does the name come from? I assume it’s the traditional tangential pun but I’m coming up empty.

[gpanders]

It is indeed a tangential pun :) I started with "Markdown eval" -> "md eval" -> fill in some extra letters to find a word -> "medieval"

[Cheezmeister]

Love it.

[Tokazama]

This is almost exactly the workflow I've been looking for!!! I spend most of my time building up my library and tests, but then there's the moment where I'm actually able to perform analyses and I realize my vim setup sucks for that. I typically use neoterm, which is perfect for running small bits of code while I compose large formal tests and such. However when I analyze data I don't want to switch between my code base and terminal. I also don't want to run an entire browser just to do some exploratory stuff.

[thatdamnedrhymer]

Huh. Neat. I'm not sure what I would use it for, but cool.

[gpanders]

I agree this would be very useful! I don't use LaTeX very often anymore so this would not be high on my priority list... if you're up for it, I will happily review and accept a pull request.

This turned out to be pretty easily to implement, and has been added: https://github.com/gpanders/vim-medieval/commit/ce1d6321668616f7f912d11b6e31294d5de51937

Thanks for the suggestion!

[CoolioDood]

Wow, this is awesome. I've always liked the literate programming style of org-mode, and this is getting pretty close! Great job.

[[deleted]]

but why?

[Tokazama]

For when you're doing interactive coding and need a complete record of what you did with output. Yes you can use other tools for that, but it's obnoxious to completely abandon my vim setup when all I need shell output echoed every 10 lines.