This post is in continuation with this post.
Two weeks have passed since the coding period began for Google Summer of Code on 14th May. After setting up my system in a room with a loud music system, I officially began coding.
The progress so far
The first task that I needed to do was to break up the one global grid used for screen-handling into smaller per-window grids which would later let external UIs manage them individually. Björn had already laid the foundation for abstracting window grids. So I began my work by going through his work and cherry-picking the commits that were relevant for my task.
Building on top of that, with regular code-reviews by Björn, I modified the screen_* functions into grid_* functions which manipulated grids instead of the screen.
While this was being done, we had many discussions about keeping certain grid elements on the global grid like the window-separators (vsep and statusline), cmdline, tabline etc. These might be assigned separate grids later.
Next steps
The next step will be to externalize the said grids for the external UIs to take advantage of. For this, we have planned to assign unique handles to grids and let the UIs receive events in a per-grid basis, if they choose to.
Experience working with Neovim
My experience working with Neovim (mainly, Björn) so far has been very pleasant. Bjorn is extremely hardworking and inspiring. Also, I learn something new every day just by reading the rich codebase and the code-reviews that I receive. Hope to keep on learning and keep on working!
The work done so far can be found here.
Follow the gsoc tag for updates.