jVi - vi/vim editor clone

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).

• marks, file-marks and yank buffers, for example "ay'a.
  These are persisted between sessions, along with colon and search commands.
• over 200 normal mode commands, operators and motions
• tag stack
• visual mode, including detailed visual block mode help and 2D examples aka RECTANGULAR EDIT)
• text object selection
• map commands for user defined key mappings
• 'wrap', 'linebreak' and 'list' options; also horizontal scroll commands
• :set all and several other :set commads
• substiute command with back references, there are options to specify what meta characters need to be escaped, so you can enter
  :.,$s/([^ ]*) (.*$)/\2 \1
• modeline processing; modeline and modelines options.
• Results of commands like :g/TextFilter/p go into output window with hyperlinks to file.
• The bang commands: such as !{motion}{filter}, :{range}![!]{filter} [!][arg] and of course :!{cmd}. vim options shell, shellcmdflag and shellxquote
• = operator with equalprg option. When equalprg empty, hook into platform reindent.

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.

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.

Support

• Report a bug
• Make a feature request
• Use the jVi Open Discussion Forum
• There's a very low volume announcement mailing list
• Other communications can be sent to jVi
• At sourceforge there's the jVi project page

• bugs and anomolous behavior
• what "must have" vi and/or vim features are missing
• severe performance problems
• applications where jVi can be embedded

License Information

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.

jVi for JBuilder Download

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)