Learning the vi Editor, Sixth Edition

12.6. GUI Interfaces

The screen shots and the explanation in this section were supplied by Kevin Buettner, Tom Dickey, and Paul Fox. We thank them.

There are several X11 interfaces for vile, each utilizing a different toolkit based on the Xt library. There is a plain "No Toolkit" version which does not use a toolkit, but has custom scrollbars and a bulletin board widget for geometry management. There are versions which use the Motif, Athena, or OpenLook toolkits. Of these, the "No Toolkit" version is probably best supported since that is the version that some of vile's authors most frequently use. But the Motif and Athena versions have more features, such as menu support.

Fortunately, the basic interface is the same for each of these versions. There is a single top level window which may be split into two or more panes. The panes, in turn, may be used to display multiple views of a buffer or multiple buffers or mixture of both. In vile parlance these panes are called "windows," but to avoid confusion, we will continue to call them "panes" in the following discussion.

12.6.1. Building xvile

To build xvile, you have to choose which toolkit version to use. This is done when you configure vile with the configure command. The relevant options are:

--with-screen=value

Specify terminal driver. The default is tcap, for the termcap/terminfo driver. Other values include ncurses (a special case of terminfo), X11, OpenLook, Motif, Athena, Xaw, Xaw3d, neXtaw, and ansi.

--with-scr=value ...