Text editors

[Christopher Atlee <catlee isgtec com>]

Hi there,

I've noticed that many gnome projects (Screem and gIDE come to mind) often
include their own implementation of a text editor complete with syntax
highlighting, etc.

Would it not make sense for these programs to make use of a common text
editor instead of providing their own?  I use vim at home, I love it.  It
does syntax highlighting, it's quick and having an embedded perl/python
interpreter can be very useful.  I know other people love emacs.

I was thinking that it would be great if I could use a componentized version
of vim in any application that needed a text editor.  The component could
have interfaces to get and set the text in the editor (for use in things
like a gnome spell checker, remembrance agent, context help in an IDE, etc.)
and change formatting (for highlighting misspelled words).

Has any work been done on something like this?  Has it been there all along
and I've missed it?

Just my $0.02

Cheers,
Chris