vibe, a line-editor with vi-compatible keystrokes

pj at pjb.com.au pj at pjb.com.au
Tue Jul 30 20:08:39 EDT 2013


Greetings.

Being an ageing vi-user, and since vi doesn't handle screen-readers well,
I've been writing a line-editor in Perl with vi-like keystrokes.
I think highly of edbrowse, but I do miss my h j k l, and being able
to move the cursor within the line with b and w and Left and Right.
It's called vibe (the VI-like Blind Editor)
although I wonder if that's too ungoogleable
and so perhaps vivi (Visually Impaired VI) might be better?

The aim is to work like vim -c 'set lines=2' except to not use curses,
so as to be in more control of which characters would be output to
the screen and in what order, and to use this control to achieve
a comfortable speaking interface under both speakup and yasr.

Anyway, it's approaching releaseability and you can try it out with
  cd /usr/local/bin
  wget http://www.pjb.com.au/blin/free/vibe
  chmod 755 vibe
  perldoc vibe   # read what manual there is :-)

It currently handles h j k l 5j ArrowKeys PageUp/Down { } 0 $ w b e :123
:1 Home :$ End /somestring /perlregexp[a-m]?\d+.txt$ J i I x p P dd d}
c C D !!fmt !}fmt dw d5w u Ctrl-R ZZ w n q wq
and many combinations of the above.

It is in its very early versions; there will be bugs, and some important
functions are still not implemented, such as r, R and :r filename.
Currently, the "u" undo-command only stores one level of history.

Helpful suggestions from fellow-vi-users gratefully received...

Regards,  Peter Billam

http://www.pjb.com.au      pj at pjb.com.au     (03) 6278 9410
"Follow the charge, not the particle."  --  Richard Feynman
 from The Theory of Positrons, Physical Review, 1949


More information about the Speakup mailing list