martanne/vis

Vis - Combining Modal Editing with Structural Regular Expressions

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.

A universal editor, it has decent Unicode support and should cope with arbitrary files, including large, binary or single-line ones.

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 encourages experimentation. There is also a Lua API for in-process extensions.

Vis strives to be simple and focuses on its core task: efficient text management. Clipboard and digraph handling as well as a fuzzy file open dialog are all provided by independent utilities. 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.

Build instructions ------------------

In order to build vis you will need a C99 compiler, a POSIX.1-2008 compatible environment as well as:

• curses) (recommended)
• 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 using pkg-config(1). 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.

Documentation -------------

End user documentation can be found in the vis(1) manual page and the Wiki. Read the FAQ for common questions. Learn about some differences compared to sam(1) and vim(1)), respectively.

C API as well as Lua API documentation is also available.

Non Goals ---------

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 / #ifdef mess

How to help? ------------

There are plenty of ways to contribute, below are a few ideas:

• Artwork
• Color Themes
• Homepage?
• Documentation
• Manual Pages
• Improve :help output
• Lua
• API Documentation

and Examples

• Unit Tests
• Plugin Development
• API Design
• Testing Infrastructure
• Distribution Packaging
• Core Editor Design

Checkout the Developer Overview to get started and do not hesitate to ask question in the #vis-editor IRC channel on libera (join via your browser).