Learning the vi and Vim Editors, 7th Edition

GUI Interfaces

The screenshots and explanation for this section were supplied by Steve Kirkendall. We thank him.

elvis’s X11 interface provides a scrollbar and mouse support, and it allows you to select which fonts to use. There is no way to change fonts after elvis has created the first window. The fonts must all be monospace fonts, typically some variation of a Courier or other fixed-width font.

elvis’s X11 interface supports multiple fonts and colors, a blinking cursor that changes shape to indicate your editing mode (insert versus command), a scrollbar, anti-aliased text, an image file to use for the background (with optional tint), a user-specified icon image, and mouse actions. The mouse can be used for selecting text, cutting and pasting between applications, and performing tag searches. In addition, there is a configurable toolbar, dialog windows, a status bar, and the -client flag.

Note

The MS Windows GUI interface also supports a background image file, using the same command and using XPM format files, so that the same background image file may be used in both environments.

The Basic Window

The basic elvis window is shown in Figure 17-1.

Figure 17-1. The elvis GUI window

elvis provides a separate text search pop-up dialog box, which is shown in Figure 17-2.

Figure 17-2. The elvis ...