Vis aims to be a modern, legacy free, simple yet efficient editor combining the strengths of both vi(m) and sam.
It extends vi's modal editing with built-in support for multiple cursors/selections and combines it with sam's structural regular expression based command language.
As an universal editor it has decent Unicode support (including double width and combining characters) and should cope with arbitrary files including:
- large (up to a few Gigabytes) ones including
- Wikipedia/OpenStreetMap XML / SQL / CSV dumps
- amalgamated source trees (e.g. SQLite)
- single line ones e.g. minified JavaScript
- binary ones e.g. ELF files
Efficient syntax highlighting is provided using Parsing Expression Grammars which can be conveniently expressed using Lua in the form of LPeg.
The editor core is written in a reasonable amount of clean (your mileage may vary), modern and legacy free C code enabling it to run in resource constrained environments. The implementation should be easy to hack on and encourage experimentation. There also exists a Lua API for in process extensions.
Vis strives to be simple and focuses on its core task: efficient text management. As an example the file open dialog is provided by an independent utility. There exist plans to use a client/server architecture, delegating window management to your windowing system or favorite terminal multiplexer.
The intention is not to be bug for bug compatible with vi(m), instead we aim to provide more powerful editing features based on an elegant design and clean implementation.
In order to build vis you will need a C99 compiler, a POSIX.1-2008 compatible environment as well as:
- libcurses, preferably in the wide-character version
- libtermkey
- Lua >= 5.2 (optional)
- LPeg >= 0.12 (optional runtime dependency required for syntax highlighting)
- TRE (optional for more memory efficient regex search)
Assuming these dependencies are met, execute:
$ ./configure && make && sudo make install
By default the configure script will try to auto detect support for
Lua. See configure --help for a list of supported options. You can
also manually tweak the generated config.mk file.
Or simply use one of the distribution provided packages:
End user documentation can be found in the vis(1) manual page
and the Wiki. Read the FAQ
for common questions.
Lua API Documentation is also available.
Some features which will not be implemented:
- tabs / multiple workspaces / advanced window management
- file and directory browser
- support for file archives (tar, zip, ...)
- support for network protocols (ftp, http, ssh ...)
- encryption
- compression
- GUIs (neither x11, motif, gtk, win32 ...) although the codebase should make it easy to add them
- VimL
- right-to-left text
- ex mode, we have more elegant structural regexp
- diff mode
- vimgrep
- internal spell checker
- lots of compile time configurable features /
#ifdefmess
This section contains some ideas for further architectural changes.
The editor core should feature a proper main loop mechanism supporting asynchronous non-blocking and always cancelable tasks which could be used for all possibly long lived actions. Ideally the editor core would never block and always remain responsive.
In principle it would be nice to follow a similar client/server approach as sam/samterm i.e. having the main editor as a server and each window as a separate client process with communication over a unix domain socket.
That way window management would be taken care of by dwm or dvtm and the different client processes would still share common cut/paste registers etc.
This would also enable a language agnostic plugin system.
There are plenty ways to contribute: writing core editor features using C or extension in Lua, improving documentation or tests, packaging for your favorite distribution, ...
Checkout the Developer Overview
to get started and do not hesistate to ask question in the #vis-editor
IRC channel on freenode.