Welcome to the jVi home page. Currently this page has some random thoughts/comments, serve as the user documentation and get you to DOWNLOAD jVi for NetBeans and jVi for JBuilder download info. There is information about integrating jVi. Check out Changes by release for good overview of features available with jVi.
jVi is a port of a major chunk of vim to java. It is not like many IDE keybindings where, for example, I often hear stuff like "its similar to emacs but not the same". jVi is the same, try visual mode or map commands or :.,$s/([^ ]*) (.*$)/\2 \1/ (you can set options so you don't need to escape '(' and other metacharacters in regular expressions) or "*2d3w which deletes 6 words stashing them in the system clipboard or y% or ... And, yes, "." works. There is stuff missing, but if what's there doesn't work like vi/vim then it's a bug (or a feature).
And jVi has features not found in vim.
After a 5 year hiatus from Java, there's some personal projects I want to
work on, 3D visualization of Sacred Geometry is one of them and there may be
some RCP. I wanted to use
an open source IDE, not JBuilder, and that means another port of jVi. I looked
at Eclipse, but the burden of SWT
was more than I would bear. Looking through some NetBeans mail archives
I was led to some work that Rich Unger did a few years ago to integrate jVi
into NetBeans; many thanks Rich. He
said he put it together in an evening; it was a good proof of concept, there
was vi behavior in the editor, but it was unusable for work. But that
starting point saved me countless hours. And now, with an editor I want to use,
I can start learning about NetBeans and get my personal projects going.
Check out jVi in NetBeans and bugs and feature requests. Share your opinions, comments and look for help at the jVi Open Discussion Forum; if you use jVi, consider monitoring this Forum.
jVi is hosted on on SourceForge and makes use of only some of the
facilities. This includes hosting this web site, the Mercurial source repository,
bug tracking and mailing lists.
jVi is motivated by my frustration with the editors provided by desktop apps, from mail readers to IDE's. The advent of java based desktop apps, and the ability to extend them, makes it possible to put together a vi which easily integrates into multiple disparate apps. A goal, over time, is to make jVi fully functional with good performance. However i believe there will always be performance limitations with jVi and expect to continue using "native" editors for heavy duty tasks.
jVi is patterned after
vim.
Vim is freely available charityware and running on a large number of
platforms, including for instance amiga and mac. Check out the site for
general vi pointers and documentation. jVi is a small subset of vim. Some
source code in jVi is taken from vim and modified to work in the java
environment. The user documentation is almost exclusively from vim, only
modified to remove things that are not applicable.
The source code for jVi is licensed under the MOZILLA PUBLIC LICENSE.
See The Open Source Page and Open Source Page's Approved Licenses for more information on Open Source licensing.
Enable Vi in JBuilder.
After installing the jar into JB's lib/ext directory, restart JBuilder.
On JBuilder's menu line, select "Tools|IDE Options". Select the
"Browser" tab. The "Keymap:" combo box should allow you to
select "VI". Also there is a "VI..." tab for some options
and there are also some vi options in the "Editor" tab.
jVi versions for JBuilder 2005, 2006 from a jVi user (Thanks to scribe777)