jVi - vi editor clone
Welcome to the jVi home page. Currently these pages have some random
thoughts/comments, serve as the user documentation and get you to
jVi for NetBeans download and
other jVi download info.
There is news and information about
the different applications in which jVi is integrated.
Note that jVi is a port of a major chunk of vim. 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 :.,$s/([^ ]*) (.*$)/\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 its 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 status, issues and bugs.
Share your opinions and comments at the
jVi Open Discussion Forum; if you use jVi, consider monitoring this Forum.
jVi is available for recent JBuilder releases, that to the efforts of
scribe777. There's jVi in JBuilder
documentation, including known defects.
There's jVi javadoc.
jVi is hosted on on SourceForge and makes use of only some of the
facilities. This includes hosting this web site, the CVS source repository,
bug tracking and mailing lists.
Why jVi?
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.
Quick Start
There is a list of all
normal mode commands
supported by vim. In this list, the over 100 commands supported by jVi
are marked. The ' and " for marks and
named buffers work as expected;
a * is a named buffer for the clipboard.
There are a few colon commands
available, try :g/foo/s/bar/baz/gp, and also see the platform
specific documentation for additional colon commands.
In insert mode, only the simple Ctrl-D and Ctrl-T
are supported. Though jVi sports a Ctrl-< and Ctrl-> in insert mode
to align with '('s on the previous line.
If you are a vi or vim user you can
just start using jVi and be comfortable. You may occasionally see
a "not implemented" message.
There are a variety of options available. Check the Reference Doc
for more information. There are also some
jVi only features.
Text search commands, for example "/" and "?",
use the vim regular expression syntax, see
Searching and Patterns. If you don't like escaping
characters like "(" and "|" in patterns there are
options to change that. The java.util.regex package is used and
javadocs describe the pattern syntax.
jVi is embedded; where applicable, the
standard commands, for example ":w", are directed to the
application for execution.
There may be capabilities available
while editing that are provided by the primary application. For example,
when jVi is used within
JBuilder,
or
NetBeans,
code insight works while editing.
The platform specific documentation about jVi should be consulted.
Almost all of the reference documentation is derived from the vim help files.
A subset of the vim help files are included. They are
modified to remove things that are not applicable. This is
detailed information on the commands and operation.
jVi Download
NetBeans
jVi for NetBeans is available at sourceforge's
jVi download page.
The jVi NBMs are signed.
Here it is in human-readable format.
keytool -printcert -file jvi.cert
Owner: OU=jVi, O=Raelity Engineering, L=Campbell, ST=California, C=US
Issuer: OU=jVi, O=Raelity Engineering, L=Campbell, ST=California, C=US
Serial number: 45d098d3
Valid from: Mon Feb 12 08:41:55 PST 2007 until: Thu Aug 16 09:41:55 PDT 2012
Certificate fingerprints:
MD5: 6B:A3:8E:AB:9A:FF:93:9A:33:88:E6:E3:50:37:53:3B
SHA1: F1:AE:A1:0F:06:58:C5:A1:73:13:26:F8:1B:D4:49:98:14:A1:37:3C
Signature algorithm name: SHA1withDSA
Version: 3
jbvi-0.7.1.jar only works with JBuilder7, use jbvi-0.6.6.jar
for earlier versions of JBuilder.
For Jbuilder 3.5 use jbvi-0.6.3.6.
Download the file and extract the jar file into JB's lib/ext directory;
for some JB releases you must manually add it to JB's classpath.
The jar file can be extracted from the zip file using the jar commaned,
for example jar -xf jbvi-0.7.1.zip jbvi-0.7.1.jar.
You may
want to SHIFT-CLICK to download one of the following links.
See downloaded docs for information on enabling
full regular expression support if there seem to be issues.
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)
Version 0.7.1
Copyright © 1998-2000,2007 Raelity Engineering
Contact Raelity Engineering