Elvis for GNOME
  1. What is Elvis?
      2. Elvis is a clone of the popular U*ix text editor vi. Elvis was written by Steve Kirkendall, and you can find more information about it on the  Elvis Home Page .
      Elvis has pretty all the features of vi plus a lot more!  It already has support for normal termcap/curses interfaces plus X and Win32 user interface.  Some of these interfaces allow multiple windows to be open and the same time. In addition it has context sensitive colour highlighting for many languages, HTML editing modes, a hex mode and much more.
  2. What is GNOME?
      3. GNOME is a free, open source graphical environment, providing a consistent (but user selectable/definable) look and feel to applications on a desktop.  GNOME is built around a set of core libraries and applications which take most of the hard work out of writing graphical applications.  Find more about it on the  GNOME home page .
  3. Why Elvis for GNOME?
      4. Well for a start I like GNOME and wanted to learn how to program with the GNOME libraries.  In addition I prefer to use vi a-likes for my text editing and thought that one which integrated with GNOME would be nice.
  4. Is it ready? Where can I get it?
      5. Erm not yet I'm afraid.  I have now started using Elvis-GNOME to edit its own sources and it is holding together quite nicely; there are still quite a few nasty seg faults and major features which aren't there yet. It is also presently based on the unreleased, alpha version of the next version of Elvis.  I expect to put an Alpha version up on this web page within the next couple of months.  To keep you interested there is  the obligatory screen shot!
  5. So what does Elvis GNOME do which normal Elvis doesn't ?
      6. Well it obviously uses all of the GNOME user interface/widgets so it integrates with the look and feel of GNOME.  But in addition to that you get the ability to drag and drop files from the GNOME file managers.  All the dialogue boxes in Elvis GNOME are defined using the GLADE user interface editor.  This means that an Elvis GNOME user can define their own dialogue boxes and then bind the actions to vi colon commands.
       
by Dave Gilbert - contact me at: elvis atsign treblig.org
 
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