Elvis (text editor)

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Elvis is a powerful vi/ex clone, i.e. it resembles the Unix text editor "vi" very much but adds quite a few commands and features. Elvis is written by Steve Kirkendall and is distributed under the Clarified Artistic License which is used by Perl.

Elvis is the version of vi that comes with Slackware and KateOS.

[edit] Comments

Elvis was the pioneering vi clone, widely admired in the 1990's for its conciseness, and many features.[1][2] For that combination it is still unmatched among the vi clones, and it influenced the development of Vim until about 1997.[3][4]

It was the first to provide color syntax highlighting (and to generalize syntax highlighting to multiple filetypes),

Example of Elvis' syntax highlighting.
Example of Elvis' syntax highlighting.

first to provide highlighted selections via keyboard.

Elvis's built-in nroff (early) and (later) html displays gave it unusual WYSIWYG features.

Example of Elvis' hypertext help screen.
Example of Elvis' hypertext help screen.

Elvis recognizes binary files, as well and provides a split screen for editing them.

Example of Elvis' hexadecimal editing mode.
Example of Elvis' hexadecimal editing mode.

jelvis, a Japanese variant, is available, based on work by Jun-ichiro itojun Hagino up until 1998.[5] His more recent work in this area has been distributed as patches against nvi. A Korean variant helvis is also available, originally by Park Chong-Dae.[6][7] These variants were modifications of elvis 1.8 (July 10, 1994).[8] The nvi editor is based on an older version of elvis 1.5 (April 2, 1992).[9]

[edit] References

  1. ^ (August 13, 1992). "editor-faq/Editor_List". comp.editors. (Web link).
  2. ^ Editors available on central UNIX platforms (September 21, 1994). Retrieved on 2008-02-07.
  3. ^ VIM - Wishlist. Retrieved on 2008-05-22.
  4. ^ Wishlist for vim 6.0 (1998). Retrieved on 2008-05-22.
  5. ^ Jun-ichiro Hagino, KAME Project; and Yoshitaka Tokugawa, WIDE Project (June 6-11, 1999), “Multilingual vi Clones: Past, Now and the Future”, 1999 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, USENIX, <http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix99/summaries/> 
  6. ^ FreshPorts description of helvis.
  7. ^ README file for helvis.
  8. ^ A clone of vi/ex, the standard UNIX editor, with Japanese patch.
  9. ^ Thomas E. Dickey (January 23, 2007). "how to draw a line in vi at 80 columns". comp.unix.programmer. (Web link).

[edit] External links

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