.---------------------------------------------------------------. | This is not elvis' user manual! The real documentation for | | elvis is located in its online help facility. While running | | elvis, enter the command ":help" to see the table of contents.| ^---------------------------------------------------------------^1. About this file
This file is written in the HTML markup language. You can view it with any WWW viewer, such as Netscape. You can also use elvis 2.2 to view it; this version of elvis has the ability to view HTML documents, and print them.This file has many hypertext links. Use them! If you're using elvis 2.2 to browse this file, then hypertextual references will appear as underlined text. (Except on color PCs; since color video cards don't support underlining, hypertextual references will be colored -- white on red, by default.) To follow the hypertext link, move the cursor onto the underlined text and press (Enter). To go back, press (Control-T). The (Tab) key moves the cursor forward to the next hypertext reference.
If elvis 2.2 doesn't automatically start up in HTML mode when you view this file, then you'll need to force it into HTML mode by giving the command "
:display html".2. Differences between vi and elvis 2.2
Elvis is a superset of vi. It runs on more operating systems than vi, it is free, and you can obtain the source code. Elvis also has many new features. These new features are described in the first chapter of the online manual, which hypertext links to the other parts of the manual where those features are described in detail. Here's a just brief list:
:color command has been rewritten.
The new version is much more powerful, and it should be more intuitive.
Instead of assigning colors to a small number of fonts as in previous
versions of elvis,
the new :color command assigns colors and font attributes to
be used for a large variety of specialized text types.
:color command is...
:color [gui.]type [like type] [bold] [italic] [underlined]... where the items in brackets are optional, bold text is literal, and italic names represent variable text. The [gui.]type must be the first argument of the command, but the other arguments can appear in any order.
[boxed] [graphic] [fixed|proportional] [color] [on color]
As a special case, giving the :color command without any
arguments will list the current color settings.
Invoking :color with just a type argument will
list the setting of that text type.
The meanings of the arguments are as follows:
:mkexrc command can build a .exrc
file which works correctly on all GUIs.
For example, it might have "color termcap.normal yellow on blue" and
"color x11.normal black on linen".
:color
command.
The normal text type is the most important.
It is the only text type used in the "normal" display mode,
for the current window.
Also, any other text type which for which a color or attribute has not been
explicitly set will inherit that color or attribute from the
normal text type.
This inheritance happens when the screen is drawn, so any time you change
the normal background color, the default background for all other text types
also changes.
The idle text type is another special one.
What normal does for the current window, idle does
for all other windows.
This means that if you give normal and idle
different background colors, then the current window will always be
highlighted.
The default setting of idle is "color idle like normal" which avoids
that behavior.
Some other text types are lnum for the line numbers displayed
by :set number,
hexheading for column headings in "hex" mode,
hexcursor for the hexadecimal version of the current
character in "hex" mode,
and header for the page headers when printing in "normal"
or "syntax" display mode.
The "syntax" display mode will eventually be rewritten to allow users to specify roles in the "elvis.syn" file, but for now the following role names are hardcoded: comment, string, char, regexp, keyword, function, variable, other, number, prep for preprocessor directives, and prepquote for text in angle brackets in an #include directive.
The markup display modes ("html", "man", and "tex") have not been modified to take advantage of the new color scheme yet, so there are no role names for them. This is a shame, really, because they could really benefit from the new attribute combination rules. That was a big influence in the design of the new color code.
normal or idle role.
The like role notation allows you to define an
additional role for them to inherit from.
For example, you could say "color char like string" to make character literals
look like string literals; after that, any change to the "string" role would
also automatically change the "char" role too.
normal or some other role).
The boxed attribute is new; it draws a box around the text in the "x11" and "windows" GUIs. This is intended to draw boxes around individual words, not whole paragraphs. It is ignored by the "termcap" interface. When printing, the PostScript print drivers draw boxes around the text, and most other print drivers print a gray background instead of a box.
lptype=ps or lptype=ps2) they select
one of two different fonts.
The fonts are configurable in the lib/elvis.ps file;
by default fixed text is printed using a Courier font,
while proportional is printed using a Times font.
Printing with a proportional font is a bit quirky though. Elvis' text formatting always assumes fixed-pitch fonts are used, so to keep mixtures of fonts looking good, the PostScript printer driver adjusts the width of each chunk of proportional text to match the width it would have had in a fixed-pitch font. For long segments of proportional text you probably won't notice this, but when an individual word is printed in a proportional font it may be stretched noticibly.
normal or some other role.
The list of supported color names for each GUI is unchanged. Any color names supported by previous versions of elvis should still be supported. See the "User interface" section of the manual for details.
The "windows" interface now allows any number of different colors to be used, via X11' "#rrggbb" notation. Previously, only a single foreground color plus a single background color could be set this way.
The "termcap" interface is smart enough to leave colors unchanged if you never explicitly set any foreground and/or background colors. For example, if before starting elvis you set your terminal's background color to blue, and your :color settings only affect the foreground, then the termcap interface will never explicitly change the background color so it should remain blue. (This assumes that the ANSI "^[[0m" escape sequence won't turn off the color.)
:color command can
directly assign attributes to text types named "comment", etc.
Consequently, those options have been deleted.
Similarly, the "windows" interface used to have options named boldstyle, emphasizedstyle, fixedstyle, italicstype, normalstyle, and underlinedstyle to control the attributes of fonts. The "x11" interface used to have an "underline" option. Those options have been eliminated, although the Options->Gui... menu item and its dialog remain. The dialog now issues :color commands instead of :set commands.
However, the "termcap" interface retains its ttyunderline option. That is still necessary because it helps the "termcap" interface avoid problems that occur when underlining and background colors are both used on CGA/EGA/VGA video cards.
When changing the normal background color of the "windows"
GUI window, there are some areas around the outside of the text which aren't
redrawn in the new color.
If the window is resized, or PAINTed, they're redrawn with the new color,
but I can't seem to make that happen automatically.
Serge, please check my code at guiwin32/guiwin.c, line 1088, and see if you
can figure out what I'm doing wrong.
I've modified the dialog associated with the Options->Gui... menu item., but it still needs work. In particular, it should be able to set the foreground and background colors, but I haven't been able to get the combo boxes to work correctly yet.
There is at least one screen glitch in the boxed text:
If you delete the last character from boxed text, the right edge of the
box is not redrawn.
I haven't attempted to convert the "vio" user interface. Herbert, that'll have to be your job. The arguments to the (*gui->draw)() and (*gui->color)() functions have changed, and there are two new functions inserted after (*gui->color)() named (*gui->freecolor)() and (*gui->setbg)().
The new function pointers, (*gui->freecolor)() and (*gui->setbg)(), can both be NULL for vio. The vio version of (*gui->color)() will probably be almost identical to the termcap version. The only function that might cause you grief is (*gui->draw)().
This is a global option, but it is only effective while you're in the syntax display mode, because the definitions of "function name" and "open parenthesis" may vary with on your programming language.
Currently the tag search is performed via the ref program,
but this may change in the future.
Adding the search code into elvis should make it faster, and also gives the
search mechanism access to elvis' tag heuristics.
In expressions, "feature("smartargs")" will return True if
your version of elvis which supports the smartargs feature, and False otherwise.
The smartargs option itself always exists in elvis 2.2, even if its behavior
isn't supported.
timestamp option.
Its value is a string, which will normally be set via the new
time function.
Elvis doesn't use it for anything internally, but the elvis.arf
and elvis.awf functions have been modified to set it, and
elvis.bwf has been modified to test it.
elvis.bwf or
elvis.awf.
It indicates whether the "!" flag was used in a ":w" command.
This is important because elvis.bwf is responsible for
detecting changes in the file's timestamp, and we want to be able to override
that by adding the "!".
ignorecase to be disregarded if the regular
expression contains uppercase letters.
autoselect option.)
The instances will remain highlighted until you give a :nohlsearch
command.
:if, :let, and others.
current(regexp) feature, described below.
current()
function has previously supported, you can now pass it a regular expression.
This can be either a string which starts with a / character, or a
literal regular expression as described above.
The return value will be the matching text. To find this text, elvis starts searching from the beginning of the line, for all non-overlapping instances of text which match the regular expression. When it finds a match which includes the cursor position, it returns that match. If there is no such match, then an empty string is returned.
For example, current(/./) returns the current character, and
current(/\S*/) returns the current whitespace-delimited word
(or an empty string if the cursor happens to be on whitespace).
Here's a subtle one: current(/..../) divides the line into
4-character chunks and returns the chunk containing the cursor, or "" if the
cursor is located after the last complete chunk.
Using strings instead of literal regular expressions,
current("/.") would return the current character, exactly like
current(/./).
In fact, the current() function can't tell the difference between them,
because of the way that regular expressions are parsed.
This is the first function to have a side-effect. I'm not sure I like that.
Here's an example showing how this might be used.
alias man {
"Display a man page in a new window
local b report=0 nosaveregexp
let b = newbuffer()
(=b) set bufdisplay=man
(=b)split
(=b)r !!man !*
try (=b)1 s/^Reformatting.*ait\.\.\.$//
try (=b)% s/\\/\\\\/g
try (=b)% s/_\(.\)/\\fI\1\\fR/g
try (=b)% s/.\(.\)/\\fB\1\\fR/g
try (=b)% s/\\fR\\fB//g
try (=b)% s/\\fR\\fI//g
(=b)1 i .nf
(=b) set nomod
}
To implement this, I added a dirtime() function to all of the
osXXXX/osdir.c files.
[role [attributes]]
[+line] [file]
:edit command, except that
:push saves the cursor position on the tag stack.
:howto scroll wheel".
This is particularly important for WinElvis, since whole lines are selected by dragging the mouse in a narrow strip along the left edge of the window. Previously, this was very difficult to do if the "number" option was turned on. Now it should be easier.
ref program has been modified to append elvis' elvispath
onto the end of the normal tag path.
This was done mostly to provide a clean way for ref to act as
a reference to the standard C library.
Elvis' lib directory now contains an "ansistub.c" file and a "tags" file
derived from it.
You can now obtain information about a standard C library function by running
"ref function", or by moving the cursor onto the function
name in an edit buffer and hitting Ctrl-K.
It also works well with the new smartargs option.
This feature was added because using :eval to evaluate buffer
names was cumbersome since the parentheses have special meaning in both
expressions and ex addresses, and also because :eval affects
parentheses and backslashes throughout the line, not just in the buffer name.
The following example demonstrates the two techniques, deleting any backspace
sequences in the buffer whose name is stored in option x.
Clearly, the ":(=x)" version is smaller and easier to understand.
:eval \((x)\)%s/.\\b\\\(.\\\)/\\1/g :(=x)%s/.\b\(.\)/\1/g
Windowing will be more versatile. Currently the GUI versions of elvis always split detached windows; sometimes it would be nice if they could be attached to the existing window, as a horizontal or vertical pane.
I intend to add a true extension language to elvis. The language interface will be general enough to support a variety of languages. The first language supported will probably be PERL, followed rapidly by Python and TCL.
I'm thinking of modifying the markup display modes (man, tex, and html) to store the list of supported markups, and their effects, in a separate file. That way, you could create your own markups to display nroff -ms, RTF, SGML, and MIME "rich text" documents.
I'd like to redesign the way elvis assigns assigns buffer names. I'd like to make it always use the full pathname of a file as the buffer name. In addition, I'd like for elvis to store a "current working directory" for each window, and use that to convert a relative buffer name into a the absolute pathname. A similar trick would be used for filenames. When running an external program, elvis would change the real current directory to that window's directory. The benefits of all this:
Most of the following are binary files, not text or HTML files, so you can't view then with your Web browser. But you can use your browser to download the files. For Netscape, use <Shift-Click>; for MSIE, use <RightClick> and "download".
untardos,
run it with no arguments.
untarw32,
run it with no arguments, in a text-mode window.
NOTE:
MS-Windows95 and MS-DOS use incompatible methods for mapping long file names
to short ones.
So if you extract the files under Windows95, DOS programs won't be able to
find them with their expected names, and vice versa.
Consequently, you must use untardos.exe to unpack
elvis-2.1_4-msdos.tar.gz, and untarw32.exe to unpack
elvis-2.1_4-win32.tar.gz.
untaros2,
run it with no arguments.
elvis-2.1_4-os2.tar.gz file, above.