Streaming data from process into buffer

[Ben Gamari <bgamari@gmail.com>]

Hey all,

I have recently been working on bringing Carl Worth's excellent
notmuch[1] mail indexing application into a state where I can rely on it
for everyday use. While most of the Intel folks developing notmuch use
emacs for both development and using notmuch, I prefer to avoid carpal
tunnel whenever possible and thus use vim. While there exists an
excellent notmuch frontend for vim, it suffers from the incredibly
annoying limitation of being unable to asynchronously stream data from
its notmuch subprocess. This can result in extremely long periods of
hanging during large searches.

Looking at the emacs frontend, it seems that emacs provides an excellent
subprocess interface, where one can supply a callback to be called when
data is available from the process. This interface, amazingly enough,
resembles an interface proposed on this list only a few hours ago.[2]

Has anyone examined what would be necessary to implement such an
interface in vim? Has anyone perhaps started work on such an interface?
Would this be a reasonable task for an experienced programmer unfamiliar
with the vi codebase to take on? I'll take a look at the code later
today.

I hope things are going well.

Cheers,

- Ben


[1] http://www.notmuch-mail.org/
[2] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.editors.vim.devel/25108