Xiki: For the VIM and Fedora guy

So yeah, I love the idea of Xiki (definitely check out this screencast for a snapshot of how it works)… But as they say, “You lost me at Emacs.”

* This is a scambaiting trophy from the infamous “Fritz Weisenheimer” a scam-baiting personality. It’s just all too applicable now.

So, ehn. As a long time vi guy (and I don’t expect this to fully replace vi), I decided to bite the bullet and try it. Also, I’m not a ruby guy. So this Emacs + Ruby stack was like “Uhhh oh.” But as the xiki guy says “You don’t have to know Emacs.” So along I trudged, and eventually I was able to get it to work in Fedora 17, the beefy miracle.

You can follow their installation tutorial, at the main page of Xiki’s github page. And as usual that kind of thing got me “most of the way there.” But, I ran into a few snags, and this is the recipe I came up with.

Note! You may have to run some of these commands as root.

[user@host]$ yum install ruby rubygems
[user@host]$ yum install emacs
[user@host]$ gem install bundle
[user@host]$ gem install trogdoro-el4r
[user@host]$ wget https://github.com/trogdoro/xiki/zipball/master
[user@host]$ mv trogdoro-xiki-X.Y.Z-stuff.zip xiki.zip
[user@host]$ unzip xiki.zip
[user@host]$ mv xiki/ /usr/src/xiki
[user@host]$ cd /usr/src
[user@host]$ cd xiki
[user@host]$ bundle install --system
[user@host]$ ruby etc/command/copy_xiki_command_to.rb /usr/local/bin/xiki
[user@host]$ bash etc/install/el4r_setup.sh
[user@host]$ xiki
[user@host]$ xiki status
[user@host]$ xiki restart
[user@host]$ xiki directory # copy the output from this for the init.rb
[user@host]$ nano ~/.el4r/init.rb
# init.rc file:
# $LOAD_PATH.unshift "{copied directory from above}/lib"
# require 'xiki'
# Xiki.init
#
# KeyBindings.keys   # Use default key bindings
# Themes.use "Default"  # Use xiki theme
[user@host]$ emacs

Now once you’re in emacs, give it a try, create a line that reads: “$ ls -l” and then hit alt-enter. Voila! It should print a list from a ls command and allow you to edit that text, etc.

When you’re going through this and run into trouble, list your /tmp dir and check out the newest files there – you’ll see a couple logs from el4r, and from xiki. (This didn’t exactly help me through the process, but, figured I would note it)

I also realized that “alt+l” (small l, as in Larry) re-loads the el4r, which if xiki bugs out, is handy to use.

Notably, after this whole process… The “pretty theme” didn’t load, all the formatting was plain, and I could only use alt-enter, and not double click. I’m not sure -exactly- what fixed it. But in the meanwhile doing other things, I rebooted my laptop, and then fired up emacs again… And! It all worked. I understand this isn’t a solution by any means, but, maybe it can trigger in your own brain reading this, what you may need to reset/restart if you’d like to achieve this without a reboot.