Learning the vi Editor, Sixth Edition

10.12. Sources and Supported Operating Systems

The official WWW location for elvis is ftp://ftp.cs.pdx.edu/pub/elvis/README.html . From there, you can download the elvis distribution or get it directly using ftp from ftp://ftp.cs.pdx.edu/pub/elvis/elvis-2.0.tgz .

The source code for elvis is freely distributable. The licensing terms are described in the COPYING file in the distribution, and they permit distribution in source and binary form. elvis 2.1 will be distributed under the terms of perl's Artisitc License.

elvis works under UNIX, MS-DOS, Windows 95, and Windows NT. As of this writing, a port to OS/2 is in progress, but is not yet integrated into the sources (but see the previous section).

Compiling elvis is straightforward. Retrieve the distribution via ftp or via a web browser. Uncompress and untar it,^[5] run the configure program, and then run make:

^[5] The untar.c program available from the elvis ftp site is a very portable, simple program for unpacking gzip'ed tar files on non-UNIX systems.

$ gzip -d < elvis-2.0.tgz | tar -xvpf -
...
$ cd elvis-2.0; ./configure
...
$ make
...

elvis should configure and build with no problems. Use make install to install it.

In elvis 2.0, on Linux systems using GCC, you should recompile the file lp.c without optimization. Otherwise, at least in our experience, elvis tends to core dump when using the :lpr command to format and print ...