Elvis (text editor)

Elvis is a powerful vi/ex clone, i.e. it resembles the Unix text editor "vi" very much but adds quite a few commands and features. Elvis is written by Steve Kirkendall and is distributed under the Clarified Artistic License which is used by Perl.

Elvis is the version of vi that comes with Slackware and KateOS.

Comments

Elvis was the pioneering vi clone, widely admired in the 1990s for its conciseness, and many features. [cite newsgroup
url=http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.uib.no/pub/vi/comp.editors.EDS
title=editor-faq/Editor_List
newsgroup=comp.editors
date=August 13, 1992] [cite web
url=http://www.desy.de/~kuenne/editors.txt
title=Editors available on central UNIX platforms
date=1994-09-21
accessdate=2008-02-07] For that combination it is still unmatched among the vi clones, and it influenced the development of Vim until about 1997. [cite web
url=http://www.vmunix.com/vim/wish.html
title=VIM - Wishlist
accessdate=2008-05-22] [cite web
url=http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1998/11/msg00011.html
title=Wishlist for vim 6.0
date=1998
accessdate=2008-05-22]

It was the first to provide color syntax highlighting(and to generalize syntax highlighting to multiple filetypes),first to provide highlighted selections via keyboard.

Elvis's built-in nroff (early) and (later) html displays gave it unusual WYSIWYG features.

Elvis recognizes binary files, as well and provides a split screen for editing them.

jelvis, a Japanese variant, is available, based on work by Jun-ichiro itojun Hagino up until 1998. [citation
url=http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix99/summaries/
contribution=Multilingual vi Clones: Past, Now and the Future
author=Jun-ichiro Hagino, KAME Project; and Yoshitaka Tokugawa, WIDE Project
title=1999 USENIX Annual Technical Conference
date=June 6-11, 1999
publisher=USENIX] His more recent work in this area has been distributed as patches against nvi. A Korean variant helvis is also available, originally by Park Chong-Dae. [cite web |url=http://www.freshports.org/korean/helvis/|title=FreshPorts description of "helvis"] [cite web|url=http://hep1.snu.ac.kr/pub/computing/doc/README.hangul|title=README file for "helvis"] These variants were modifications of "elvis" 1.8 (July 10, 1994). [cite web
url=http://www.freebsdsoftware.org/japanese/elvis.html
title=A clone of vi/ex, the standard UNIX editor, with Japanese patch] The nvi editor is based on an older version of "elvis" 1.5 (April 2, 1992). [cite newsgroup
url=http://groups.google.com/group/comp.unix.programmer/browse_frm/thread/3d2b02e6ca49d66d/7d8140a01a868c87?lnk=st&q=&rnum=2#7d8140a01a868c87
title=how to draw a line in vi at 80 columns
author=Thomas E. Dickey
newsgroup=comp.unix.programmer
date=January 23, 2007]

References

External links

* [http://elvis.vi-editor.org/ Elvis' homepage]
* [http://www.oceanwave.com/technical-resources/unix-admin/editors.html Elvis said to run on MINIX]
* [http://www.dnull.com/bsd/oldnews/bsdnew91215.html Comment on vi-compatibility]