.---------------------------------------------------------------.
| 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.|
^---------------------------------------------------------------^
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".
For a more complete list, with links to detailed descriptions, check the
online manual.
You can bring up the online manual by starting elvis and giving the command
":help".
The list of extensions appears after the table of contents and a brief
introduction.
: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)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
(=b) split
}
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
elvis -Gquit -c "set lptype=html lpcolor||lp! foo.html" foo.c
... so the "quit" interface must support colors.
All GUIs now support the "#RRGGBB" notation for colors. When used with the termcap/open/script/quit user interfaces, the requested color is rounded to the nearest available color.
:color commands can begin with "+=" or "-="
to alter existing attributes instead of completely replacing them.
For example, ":color comment += bold" adds the bold attribute to comments
without losing any other comment attributes, and ":color comment -= italic"
removes the italic attribute.
The "windows" GUI now supports colors named "gray1" through "gray99".
Previously, "-b blksize" was used to select the block size used in elvis' session file. This has been changed to "-B blksize". I decided to use "-b" for binary files because users rarely bother to change the block size, and because vim uses "-b" for binary files. I want to avoid unnecessary incompatibilities.
lpout="-" will cause the printer output to be sent
to stdout.
This can be handy when elvis is used noninteractively to format files...
elvis -Gquit -c "set lptype=bs lpout=-|lp" ref.man | more
There is a new "ansi" printer type, which outputs xterm escape sequences
for changing attributes.
This adds maybe 200 bytes to elvis.
It works well in conjunction with the lpout="-" thing,
described above.
Text object names are two characters long. The first character is 'a' to include whitespace or delimiters surrounding the object, or 'i' for just the object itself. The second character identifies the type of object; it can be one of the following:
.---------.----------------------------------------------------.
| 2nd char| Description of the text object |
|---------|----------------------------------------------------|
| w | word or punctuation string, like b e w commands |
| W | whitespace-delimited word, like B E W commands |
| s | sentence, like ( ) commands |
| p | paragraph, like { } commands |
| S | section, like [[ ]] commands |
| { [ ( < | block, delimited by the previous char & its match |
| } ] ) > | block, delimited by the following char & its match |
| b | parenthesis block, like a( or i( |
| B | brace block, like a{ or i{ |
| % | block, delimited by (, [, or { on left & its match |
| L | block, delimited by varying levels of indentation |
| l | line |
| other | field, delimited at both ends by the character |
^---------^----------------------------------------------------^
The use of uppercase S for sections, % for any brace-delimited block, L for indentation-delimited block, l for lines, and other punctuation for field delimiters are all extensions beyond vim's text objects.
For block and field text objects, the 'a' version includes the delimiting characters, while the 'i' version excludes them. For the other text objects, the 'a' version includes trailing whitespace (or leading whitespace if there is no trailing whitespace), and the 'i' version is just the object itself without the surrounding whitespace.
Text objects accept counts.
For blocks, the count is the number of levels of embedded brackets to
skip.
For other text objects, the count is the number of consecutive objects
to use, starting with the current one.
For example, "3daw" deletes three words,
while "3da{" moves out three level of braces, and then deletes
that single large brace-delimited block.
Although Vim allows text objects to be used as the first command while visually selecting text (e.g, "vas" selects a sentence), elvis does not support this.
By default, hlobject=al so it will highlight lines.
Setting hllayers=1 will cause the current line to be highlighted.
Another popular choice is hlobject=a{ hllayers=9 to highlight
up to nine layers of nested blocks.
Each layer can be highlighted differently. The outermost highlighted layer is always highlighted using a font named "hlobject1", the next layer uses "hlobject2", and so on. If hllayers is set higher than the number of hlobjectn fonts, then elvis will loop back to the hlobject1 again when it runs out of defined fonts.
:help fold".
Briefly...
:fold creates a new folded region, or refolds an unfolded one.
:unfold creates a new unfolded region, or unfolds a folded one.
:color fold ..." to control its display attributes.
fold() and unfold(),
test whether the current line is currently folded or previously folded.
:foldc alias folds the bodies of C functions.
To play with this, start editing a C source file and give the command
":foldc".
The body of each function should be reduced to a single line.
To unfold one, move the cursor onto the folded line and hit the
<Tab> key.
To fold it again, hit the <Tab> key a second time.
/ and ?
vi commands to search incrementally as you type in the regular expression,
instead of waiting for you to hit <Enter> before searching.
To maintain compatibility with vim, the abbreviated name of "incsearch" is "is". The "initialstate" option used to have that abbreviated name; I had to change it to "init" to avoid a name clash.
:normal command.
It allows ex scripts to execute vi commands.
There are some differences between elvis' implementation and vim's:
:normal!). Elvis' version never interprets maps. In effect,
elvis acts as though it always had a "!" modifier.
For the sake of compatibility with earlier versions of elvis,
when :normal is invoked without any arguments it will set
the display mode to "normal", just as it always has.
tabstop and shiftwidth options can now be set
to a comma-delimited list of column widths, instead of merely a single column
width.
The last width is repeated, if necessary for long lines.
In addition, a new guidewidth option uses the same type of
width list to specify where vertical lines should be drawn on the screen.
This is sometimes handy when you're editing text with a specific format,
such as a dump of database records.
:for (or, equivalently, :foreach)
command has been added.
Like the :while command, it supplies parameters which control
a subsequent :do command.
The first parameter of :for is the name of a looping variable,
which can be any option.
The remaining parameters (after an optional "in" keyword) is a list of
values that the variable to take, for each iteration of the loop.
To help generate the list of values, a new "..." operator has been added to the built-in calculator so you can do things like this:
:for i (1 ... 10) :do set i?
alias readMAILTO {
"initialize a mailto: message
"Normally, URLs are considered to be readonly and binary,
"but since the whole purpose of the mailto: URL is to
"write text out to the mailer, we need to change that.
se noro reol=text
"Read the .signature file, if there is one.
if exists($HOME/".signature")
then {
read ~/.signature
1 i --
}
}
alias writeMAILTO {
"send a mailto: message
" This is a lot more complex that one would think.
" The mail program forks off a spooler, and the spooler
" inherits the stdout/stderr file descriptors. This
" has the unfortunate side-effect of making elvis wait
" until the mail queue is emptied, after this message
" and any other pending messages have been uploaded to
" the mailserver. Yuk! To avoid that, we redirect the
" mail program's stdout/stderr to /dev/null.
w !!mail -s"!(no subject)subject=" !2 >/dev/null 2>&1
se nomod
}
:s command wasn't always returning a failure status
when it should.
This caused some scripts to misbehave.
current() could cause core dumps or other weirdness. Fixed.
:make command wasn't writing buffers even if
autowrite option was set.
:vi +line" was ignoring the line number when
no filename was given.
showlink option had the side-effect of making the current
word be displayed on the bottom line in modes other than HTML.
:browse and :sbrowse commands, and the
:kwic alias, were broken.
incsearch option in that situation;
it'll use plain old searching instead.
hlobject option has been changed
from "al" to nothing.
This disables object highlighting, even if hllayers is set to
a non-zero value.
The "elvis.syn" file now allows language descriptions to contain "set"
lines.
These set the default value of options (i.e., they only change the value if
you haven't explicitly set that option via a :set command).
The idea here is that you can add language-specific lines such as "set hlobject=a{" to elvis.syn, and then you don't need to worry about setting
hlobject in your own initialization scripts.
elvis -fn courier*14" or
":set controlfont=times*14".
The "windows" user interface also supports this notation.
Some new option flags have been added. Invoking "elvfmt -c" will cause it to be smarter about crowns -- i.e., if the second line of a paragraph typically has different indentation than the first line, this flag causes "elvfmt" to read ahead, if necessary, to discover what a wrapped line's indentation should look like.
A new "-i charlist" flag allows you to specify characters other than whitespace, which should be included in the indentation. For example, "-i'>'" allows the > character to be used in indentation; this is handy when adjusting email messages with quoted text.
Two shorthand options have been added. "-C" is good for C/C++ comments, and is equivalent to "-c -i'/*'". "-M" is good for email messages, and is equivalent to "-i'>'".
:help command has been extended slightly.
In addition to all the previous help topics that it supported, you can
also now lookup a display mode via ":help display name".
You can also look up an HTML tag via
":help <name>".
However, please bear in mind that elvis' manual describes elvis' implementation
of HTML tags, which might not be quite how a real browser uses them.
Also, some common tags such as <center> aren't supported by elvis,
so they aren't described in the manual.
Still, it is better than nothing.
When looking up an option via ":help set option",
you can now append a "=" character after the option name if you like.
This is handy because name completion (the Tab key) adds an "="
after the names of non-Boolean options. Previously you had to backspace
over the "=", but now you can leave it.
The "ex" and "options" chapters have been reformatted for improved readability and consistency.
A new font named "hlspell" is used to highlight misspelled words. New options named "hlspell", "showspell", "spelltags", "spelldict", "spellautoload", and "spellsuffix" influence the spell checker. A new ":check" command lets you define the spell check rules for each type of text. New ":words" and ":wordfile" commands manipulate the spelling dictionary. In visual command mode, ^K moves the cursor forward to the next misspelled word. The built-in calculator has been extended with "spell()" and "spelltag()" functions, which attempt to guess the correct spelling of a word.
The ^K command may be replaced by a g S command by the time elvis 2.2 is officially released.
:let
command, to alter part of an option's value.
:let a="this is a subscripting example" :calc a[3 4] a subscripting :let a[3 4] = "an indexing" :calc a this is an indexing example
By default, subscripting uses whitespace to delimit the elements, but you can also specify a different delimiter, or divide the string into individual characters.
The && and || operators have been modified.
They return their left argument if it is false or true, respectively;
otherwise, they return their right argument.
This is more powerful than simply returning a Boolean value.
For example, you can use || to offer a default value for an
expression.
:alias say calc "!$" || "What should I say?" :say What should I say? :say hello hello
The : operator (when not part of a ?: operator)
has been defined as appending its arguments with an OS-specific path delimiter
between them.
That's ":" for Unix/Linux, and ";" for Microsoft OSes.
:mkexrc command has been refined.
It should be easier to save your configuration now.
Basically, a new "mkexrcfile" option has been created, which stores the
name of a file which was previously generated via :mkexrc.
If you later invoke :mkexrc without any arguments, elvis
will overwrite that same file, without complaining that the file already
exists.
Two new options have been created to help control whether HTML documents
are initially displayed in the "html" mode or "syntax html" mode.
Each buffer has an "initialsyntax" option which indicates
whether that particular buffer should start in "syntax" mode.
A global "prefersyntax" option is used by the
elvis.arf to set or clear initialsyntax
as appropriate.
Most people will want to set prefersyntax to either "always"
or "never", but you can also set it to "local" or "writable".
\| alternation operator is now supported.
The closure operators (*, \+, \?,
and \{m,n})
can now be applied to complex subexpressions, instead of just single-character
expressions.
You can make any closure operator be "non-greedy" by placing a \?
operator after it.
There are new \h and \H metacharacters that
match the edge of a word, or a non-edge, respectively.
There is also a new "magicperl" option that gives \b
and \B the same meanings respectively.
(Normally, \b is treated as a backspace character in regular
expressions).
A new "magicchar" option lists the metacharacters that
don't need a preceding backslash.
You can use this to tweak the regular expression syntax to be more like
egrep or Perl.
Regular expressions now support Perl-style variable interpolation,
if you set the new "magicname" option.
This also works in the replacement text of :s// commands.
This means that if a regular expression contains $name,
elvis will replace it with the value of the named option.
The following example sets "c" to a regular expression that matches C++
comments, and then uses it in a substitution that converts them to C comments.
:let c="//\\(.*\\)" :s/$c/\/*\1*\//
lptype=ps or lptype=ps2)
will now automatically sense the page size, and scale the printout accordingly.
The lppaper option still exists, but you should only set it if
you want to override the automatically sensed size.
elvis.syn file has been extended two ways.
First, a new "mostly" line has been added which allows you to specify what
color/attributes to use for words that aren't classified as keywords, functions,
or anything else.
Previously, any such word was considered to be a "variable" by default.
But since spell-checking is normally disabled for "variable" words, this
would have prevented the spell-checker from working when editing HTML source.
The "mostly" line in HTML's syntax description gets around that by making
such words be considered "formatted" instead.
The other change is also related to spell-checking. Syntax entries can now have a "documentation" line to describe the delimiters of embedded documentation. Elvis then displays the documentation using the "doc" colors and attributes. More importantly, elvis can spell-check it using the "doc" spelling rules. This is specifically intended to support Perl's POD text, and currently Perl is the only language configured to use this feature... but hopefully it'll be versatile enough to support other languages too.
You can now use text objects as part of a v/V/^V selection.
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 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.