vis – vi-like editor based on Plan 9’s structural regular expressions

vis is a vi-like editor based on Plan 9’s structural regular expressions.

The software seeks to be a modern, legacy free, simple yet efficient editor combining the strengths of both vi(m) and sam. The editor core is written in C. vis uses Lua for configuration and scripting.

vis uses the same modal editing approach as vi. It supports a ‘normal’, ‘operator pending’, ‘insert’, ‘replace’ and ‘visual’ (in both line and character wise variants) mode. The visual block and ex modes are not implemented. Instead vis has built in support for multiple selections and an interactive variant of the structural regular expression based command language of sam.

vis is released under an open source license.

Features include:

• 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.
• Syntax highlighting is provided using Parsing Expression Grammars.
• Support for sam’s structural regular expression based command language. This uses a byte stream as underlying abstraction and lets the user specify arbitrarily structured regions using regular expressions.
• Clipboard handling.
• Digraph handling.
• Fuzzy file open dialog.
• Lua API.
• Vi(m) key bindings. vis supports global as well as window local run time key mappings which are always evaluated recursively.
• Default 256 color theme: zenburn.
• Unicode support.

Its dependencies are ncurses, libtermkey, lua, lua-lpeg, tre, and file.

Website: github.com/martanne/vis
Support: Documentation, FAQ, Wiki
Developer: Marc André Tanner, et al
License: ISC license

vis is written in C and Lua. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials. Learn Lua with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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