An experimental vim fork with multi-threading capabilities.

Vim code still only executes in the main thread, but a thread-safe queue is provided that other threads can use to notify vim main loop about events.

Events published to the queue will be executed as 'User' autocommands with the filename matching the event name and v:event_arg as a string argument(empty string if no arguments were passed to the event).

Here's a simple example:

" This only works if vim is compiled with --enable-eventloop
if has('event_loop')

python << EOF
import vim
from threading import Thread
from time import sleep

def run():
    while True:
        sleep(1)
        vim.trigger('my-custom-event', 'this message came from another thread!')

t = Thread(target=run)
t.daemon = True # Only daemon threads will be killed when vim exits
t.start()
EOF

function! Notify()
python << EOF
vim.current.buffer.append(vim.eval('v:event_arg'))
EOF
endfunction

au User my-custom-event call Notify()

endif

Instructions:

First make sure you have python development headers as right now only through python scripting a plugin can access the event loop(I plan to add vimscript functions that make use of the event loop once its more stable).

On ubuntu enter sudo apt-get install python-dev to install the necessary headers. Then clone/compile:

git clone git://github.com/tarruda/vim
cd vim
make distclean
(cd src && make autoconf)
./configure --enable-pythoninterp --enable-eventloop --with-features=huge
make

After compilation enter ./src/vim --version and it should output +event_loop as an included feature.

A more complex demonstration is included in the branch:

./src/vim -u snake.vim

or

./src/vim -U snake.vim -g

There's no guarantee that this will ever get merged with mainline but I will do my best to keep it in sync with the official repository.

Plugin authors can test if this feature with has('event_loop') as shown in the example above.