Learning the vi and Vim Editors, 7th Edition

GUI Interfaces

The screen shots and the explanation in this section were supplied by Kevin Buettner, Thomas 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 that does not use a toolkit, but it has custom scrollbars and a bulletin board widget for geometry management. There are versions that use the Motif, Athena, or OpenLook toolkits.^[62] The Motif and Athena versions are the best supported, and have menu support.

There is a “single” Win32 GUI—with variations to support OLE and Unicode. On the surface, they look the same.

Fortunately, the basic interface is the same for all versions. There is a single top-level window that can be split into two or more panes. The panes, in turn, may be used to display multiple views of a buffer, multiple buffers, or a 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.

Building xvile

Although there are binary packages for xvile, you may wish to compile it on a platform with no package support.

When building xvile, you have to choose which toolkit version to use. This is done when you configure vile with the configure command.^[63] The relevant options are:

--with-screen= value

Specify terminal driver. The default is tcap, for the termcap/terminfo driver. Other values include curses, ncurses, ncursesw, X11, OpenLook, Motif ...