TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR ELVIS-2.2_0
HINT: If you're reading this via Elvis' built-in
command, then you should probably begin by reading about
itself. To do that, move the cursor onto the word
and press the Enter key.
| Copyright © 2003 by Steve Kirkendall. Permission is granted |
| to use and distribute this software in either source code |
| form, or executable form, under the terms described in the |
| license. The license is in the file "lib/license.html". |
| This software is provided with no warranty of any kind. The |
| author is not liable for any consequences arising from the |
| use of this software. |
You can contact the author via e-mail at
or via postal mail at:
1500 SW Park Avenue, #326
Portland OR 97201
If you require technical support, you may get a quicker response by
posting a message to the comp.editors
1. WHAT IS ELVIS-2.2_0
Elvis is a clone of vi/ex, the standard UNIX editor.
Elvis supports nearly all of the vi/ex commands,
in both visual mode and ex mode.
Elvis adds support for multiple files, multiple windows, a variety of
display modes, on-line help, and other miscellaneous extensions.
Like vi/ex, Elvis stores most of the text in a temporary file,
instead of RAM.
This allows it to edit files that are too large to fit
in a single process' data space.
Also, the edit buffer can survive a power failure or crash.
Elvis 2.2 runs under the following operating systems:
If you have X-windows, Elvis can use a graphical interface,
in addition to the traditional text-based interface.
- MS-Windows/95 and Windows/NT.
Both a console (text-based) and a graphical version are available.
It can also run in a DOS window under Windows 3.1.
However, there is no graphic 16-bit version of Elvis.
The basic OS/2 port only supports a text-mode interface using VIO calls;
it acts exactly like the termcap interface.
There is also a real port of the termcap version which requires the
EMX library, and a version which uses the graphical "x11" interface
which requires XFree86.
Elvis is freely redistributable under the terms of the
Perl "Clarified Artistic" License,
in either source form or executable form.
See the license.html file for the details.
1.1 About this manual
This document is written in HTML.
You should be able to view it with any Web browser, such as Mosaic or Netscape.
These browsers also allow you to print the manual, if you prefer.
You can also use Elvis to view it or print it;
Elvis has a built-in HTML display mode.
To print this document using Elvis, you must first set some
After that, you can just load any of these files,
maybe set the display mode to HTML via the command ":display html"
(if Elvis doesn't set the display mode automatically),
and then give the command ":lp".
Each chapter is stored in a separate file;
you'll need to print each one separately.
A shell script/batch file named printdoc.bat
is provided to help you do this.
1.2 Overview of Elvis
The user interface of Elvis/vi/ex is weird.
There are two major command modes in Elvis, and a few text input modes as well.
Each command mode has a command which allows you to switch to the other mode.
You will probably use the visual command mode
most of the time.
This is the mode that Elvis normally starts up in.
In visual command mode, the entire screen is filled with lines of text
from your file.
Each keystroke is interpreted as part of a visual command.
If you start typing text, it will not be inserted,
it will be treated as part of a command.
To insert text, you must first give an "insert text" command, such as
This will take some getting used to.
(An alternative exists.
Look up the initialstate option.)
The ex mode is quite different.
Elvis displays a ":" character on the bottom line of the screen, as a prompt.
You are then expected to type in a command line and hit the Enter key.
The set of commands recognized in the ex mode is different from visual mode's.
Compared to the traditional ex/vi, Elvis supports the following
major new features:
- Multiple edit buffers
- You can edit several files at the same time.
The :buffer ex command
lists the current edit buffers.
You can switch to a different buffer by typing
- Multiple windows
- The :split ex command or
^Ws visual command will create a new window
showing the same edit buffer.
You can use :split filename
to edit a different file in a new window.
Related commands allow you to do things like search for a tag and
display it in a new window,
or move among windows.
- Multiple user interfaces
- In addition to the traditional termcap
user interface, Elvis also supports graphical interfaces for
Windows95, plus some other
- A variety of display modes
- The :display command lists the
available display modes, and can set the display to a particular mode.
The ^Wd visual command toggles between
- Online help
- This uses Elvis' built-in "html" display mode to display the manual,
which uses multiple fonts and hypertext links to improve readability.
To access it, give the command :help.
(But you already figured that out, didn't you?)
- Elvis has a :lpr command, which prints
text using any of the display modes.
This means you can use it to pretty-print source code,
print hex dumps of binary files, or
format and print man-pages or HTML documents.
It is easy to print a portion of a file instead of the whole thing.
It supports a variety of printer types, plus a pseudo-printer type that
generates HTML output.
Before using this feature, you must set up the
- Highly configurable
- Elvis has a set of configuration scripts, each of which is run at a
specific time. For example, elvis.ini
is run when Elvis starts up, and elvis.arf
is run after reading a file. See the chapter on
sessions for a discussion of these.
There is also an elvis.msg file which
can be used to translate the built-in messages into another language.
The X11 interface has a fully
The elvis.syn file contains descriptions
of various languages, for use with the
syntax-coloring display mode.
- Enhanced tags
- The tags feature has been extended to support overloaded tags,
which C++ tends to use a lot. See the tags
- Macro debugger
- To help you develop keyboard macros (and also report incompatibilities
between Elvis and vi), Elvis has a built-in macro debugger. See the article
in the Tips chapter.
- Network support
- Elvis can read via the http protocol, and read/write
via the ftp protocol.
See the Internet chapter.
You can also make your own URL protocols, by defining aliases which
implement the reading and writing operations.
See the discussion in the Tips chapter
- You can construct csh-style aliases for the ex commands, via the
See the article in the Tips chapter.
- New options
- Elvis has roughly 200 different options. See the
Options chapter for a list.
Some of the highlights are:
- equalprg stores the program to run for the = command.
- guidewidth draws vertical lines at specific columns.
- hlobject and hllayers highlight text objects.
- hlsearch highlights all text that matches a search.
- incsearch makes the / and ? commands work incrementally.
- inputtab controls the effect of the <Tab> key.
- keytime and usertime control timeouts of maps.
- listchars controls the appearance of list mode.
- mapmode selects a set of maps to use for a file.
- magicchar lets you to tweak the regular expression syntax.
- prefersyntax affects the default display mode.
- ruler continuously displays the line & column of the cursor.
- show displays a variety of items on the bottom row.
- smartargs displays a function's arguments as you're typing.
- wrap selects side-scrolling or wrapping of long lines.
- writeeol controls the newline style when writing a file.
- Built-in calculator
- Elvis has a :calc command which
evaluates C-like expressions. These expressions are also used for some
other commands, such as :if and
:eval, among other things.
See the Arithmetic expressions chapter.
- Text objects
- Elvis supports text objects.
This offers a slightly more intuitive way to use the standard vi
- Folding is a way to temporarily hide parts of your text without
actually deleting it.
You can define foldable regions, and then fold them or unfold them easily
any time after that.
For more information, see the :fold and :unfold
ex commands, and the <Tab> vi command.
- Spell checker
- Elvis can be compiled with a built-in
When editing source code,
function names and data types are checked against the "tags" file, but
comments are checked against both a natural-language dictionary and "tags".
This is highly configurable.
- Auto commands
- You can configure Elvis to execute commands automatically when
certain events occur.
See the :autocmd command.
- Improved :map command
- The standard :map command has been extended
to allow you to set up maps for different contexts, or change the behavior of
- You can alter the highlighting for any
regions of text that you want,
for any reason that you want.
For example, you can cause changed lines to be displayed with a different