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:

• libtermkey
• 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
  • Name +
    Logo
  • 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).