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Vis aims to be a modern, legacy free, simple yet efficient editorcombining the strengths of both vi(m) and sam.

It extends vi's modal editing with built-in support for multiplecursors/selections and combines it withsam'sstructural regular expressionbasedcommand language.

As an universal editor it has decent Unicode support and should cope with arbitrary filesincluding: large, binary or single-line ones.

Efficient syntax highlighting is provided usingParsing Expression Grammarswhich can be conveniently expressed usingLuain the form ofLPeg.

The editor core is written in a reasonable amount of clean (your mileagemay vary), modern and legacy free C code, enabling it to run in resourceconstrained environments. The implementation should be easy to hack onand encourage experimentation. There also exists a Lua API for in processextensions.

Vis strives to besimple and focuses on its core task: efficient textmanagement. Clipboard and digraph handling as well as a fuzzy file opendialog are all provided by independent utilities. There exist plans to usea client/server architecture, delegating window management to your windowingsystem or favorite terminal multiplexer.

The intention isnot to be bug for bug compatible with vi(m), insteadwe aim to provide more powerful editing features based on an elegant designand clean implementation.

In order to build vis you will need aC99compiler, aPOSIX.1-2008compatible 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 theconfigure script will try to auto detect support forLua. Seeconfigure --help for a list of supported options. You canalso manually tweak the generatedconfig.mk file.

Or simply use one of thedistribution provided packages.

End user documentation can be found in thevis(1) manual pageand theWiki. Read theFAQ for common questions.Learn about some differences compared tosam(1) andvim(1),respectively.

C API as well asLua APIdocumentation is also available.

Some features which willnot 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 codebaseshould 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

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 Documentationand Examples
  • Unit Tests
  • Plugin Development
  • API Design
• Testing Infrastructure
• Distribution Packaging
• Core Editor Design

Checkout theDeveloper Overviewto get started and do not hesitate to ask question in the#vis-editorIRC channel on freenode.