"Bram Moolenaar's contributions to making your life in front of the terminal easier is well known. If you don't recognize the name you'll recognize his work. It's on all modern day *nix distributions and you likely use it day in and day out. The man who brought you VIM is working on a new project to make face time with your computer that much more pleasant: A-A-P. With A-A-P's .01 release announcement this past week OSDir.com caught up to Bram to talk about A-A-P and to see if this will be as big as VIM.
"OSDir: So, can you tell us what A-A-P is in plain English that even this dumb Canadian can anderstand?
"Bram Moolenaar: This is going to be a long answer, since A-A-P includes so much. Assuming that you know the 'make' program, I can say that the core item of A-A-P is kind of a super-make. You can write a recipe and execute it with the 'aap' program. The recipe contains variable settings and dependencies like a Makefile. So far no surprises, even the syntax is almost the same. Then add to that the power of Python script. This mixes with Makefile syntax very well, the comments start with a '#' and indents are used to form blocks of commands. And then add a number of commands that allow you to access the internet, perform CVS functions and much more..."
