script all in one with vim

I recently wrote a script, that makes it easy to automate interactions to remote hosts in shell script…but I’m not going to say anything about that in here…

I found it interesting to put everything in one file. source code, config file template, even help docs.

people may think it’s stupid - considering of “scalability”, a better idea is to program “modularly”… but just because of putting everything in one file does not necessarily means it’s NOT scalable.

the tool is vim VOom plugin - It seems not a problem to maintain 2M+ lines of texts (e.g. codes), and still you have a good overview of the whole structure. plus now you don’t need to spend much time to design the “interfaces” between modules . why breaking things into pieces when they can work just fine in one?

here is how the problems of “one-file” method can be worked-around:

• when the script grows, it’s hard to maintain…

  • with a code structure tree showing the whole code structure, it’s not a problem to get a highlevel overview to the whole file.
  • you can jump back and forth between different points of a work flow quickly, without getting lost.

• when you want to write the doc, change the tree from “code tree” to a “doc tree”

  • now the document structure will be displayed in the tree, other things like the source code will be ignored.
  • you can jump in the doc structure the same way as you do in the source code.