| VILE(1) | General Commands Manual | VILE(1) |
vile, xvile, uxvile, lxvile - VI Like Emacs
vile [@cmdfile] [+command] [-FhIiRVv] [-gNNN] [-kcryptkey] [-spattern] [-ttag] [filename]...
vile is a text editor. This man page is fairly terse. More information can be obtained from the internal help, available with the -h option or by using the “:help” command from within vile.
xvile is the same text editor, built as an X-windows application, with fully integrated mouse support, scrollbars, etc.
uxvile is a wrapper around xvile which invokes the latter program with the correct locale environment required to use a unicode character set and the “UXVile” X resource class set.
lxvile is a wrapper around xvile which invokes the latter program with a font chosen to match the current locale environment.
vile retains the “finger-feel” if you will, of vi, while adding the multiple buffer and multiple window features of emacs and other editors. It is definitely not a vi clone, in that some substantial stuff is missing, and the screen doesn't look quite the same. The things that you tend to type over and over probably work. Things done less frequently, like configuring a startup file, are somewhat (or very, depending on how ambitious you are) different. But what matters most is that one's “muscle memory” does the right thing to the text in front of you, and that is what vile tries to do for vi users.
Vile accumulates most options into two temporary buffers [vileinit] and [vileopts]. The former is executed before reading the first file into a buffer. The latter is executed after reading the first file into a buffer. Each is removed after executing (unless an error is detected).
vile -c123 filename vile -c/pattern filename
:123 :/pattern
vile -c'123 goto-line' filename vile -c'search-forward /pattern/' filename
xvile-specific command-line options are detailed in the help file (see “Standard X command line arguments”. The standard ones (e.g., -display, -fn, -geometry, -name, etc.) are all supported.
vile recognizes some options which duplicate the functionality of the POSIX “-c” option:
vile will edit the files specified on the command line. If no files are specified, and standard input is not connected to a terminal, then vile will bring up a buffer containing the output of the pipe it is connected to, and will re-open /dev/tty for commands. Files (except for the first) are not actually read into buffers until “visited” All buffers are kept in memory: machines with not much memory or swap space may have trouble with this.
If the @cmdfile option is given, then the file given as “cmdfile” will be run before any files are loaded. If no @ option appears, startup commands will be taken from the user's VILEINIT variable, if it is set, from the file .vilerc in the current directory, if it exists, or from $HOME/.vilerc, as a last resort. See the help file for examples of what sorts of things might go into these command files.
Please refer to the help available within vile for vile-specific commands. (That document, however, assumes familiarity with vi.) Short descriptions of each vile command may be obtained with the “:describe-function” and “:describe-key” commands. All commands may be listed with “:show-commands”
Additional documentation on writing macros using the internal scripting language can be found in the file macros.doc, distributed with the vile source.
vile may also be built and installed as xvile, in which case it behaves as a native X Windows application, with scrollbars, better mouse support, etc.
The help file has more information on this in the section X Window System specifics.
There is a program distributed with the vile source which is usually installed as vile-manfilt. It may be used in conjunction with vile or xvile (with the help of the macros in the file manpage.rc) to filter and view system manual pages. xvile will even (with your font set properly) display certain portions of the manual page text in bold or italics as appropriate.
See the help file section on Filtering “man” pages for details.
Likewise, there are several language filters, e.g., vile-c-filt for C, which can embolden, underline, or perform coloring on program source code.
Again, see the help file section on Syntax Coloring for more information.
Vile is not simply an interactive program. Its macro language and use of environment variables lets it be useful in scripting.
The syntax filters and vile-manfilt may not be installed where you would execute them in your PATH. The vile-libdir-path script looks in the usual places and prints an updated PATH variable which other scripts can use when executing these programs.
Vile can be used as a pager (typical examples include more and less). This script uses vile-manfilt to preprocess a file which is piped to vile, adding markup which vile displays properly.
Unlike a typical pager, vile-pager handles multi-line color escape sequences, and multiple levels of overstrikes. But unlike a typical pager, vile-pager expects the pipe to be closed before it starts displaying.
Vile's “-F” option makes it act like a smart interface to the collection of syntax filters. But its output uses vile's internal markup rather than standard escape sequences. Vile's utilities include programs which translate that markup into different formats:
The vile-to-html script uses atr2html to convert a text file into HTML using color.
The program vile-crypt can be used to encrypt/decrypt files using the same algorithm as microEmac's internal crypt algorithm. This program, which uses public domain code written by Dana Hoggatt, is no longer used in vile, though it is provided for compatibility.
vile currently uses the crypt(3) function for encryption/decryption, which is available on most Unix systems. This ensures that vile is able to read and write files compatibly with vi (but not vim, which uses an different algorithm derived from info-zip). The editor's encryption/decryption key can be specified on the command line with “-k key” Text to be encrypted can be specified as filenames on the command line, or provided as the standard input.
On systems with a getpass() library routine, the user will be prompted for the encryption key if it is not given on the command line. To accommodate systems (such as linux) where the getpass() library routine is not interruptible from the keyboard, entering a crypt-key password which ends in ^C will cause the program to quit.
See the help file for more information on vile's encryption support, including a discussion of a collection of macros that interface with GNU's gpg package.
Your favorite vi document, the file macros.doc, and the vile help page, available with the -h option or as the text file vile.hlp.
vile was originally built from a copy of microEmacs, so a large debt of gratitude is due to the developers of that program. A lot of people have helped with code and bug reports on vile. Names are named at the bottom of the help file.
vile was created by Paul Fox, Tom Dickey, and Kevin Buettner.
The "VI Like Emacs” joke isn't really funny. It only sounds that way. :-) Other suspicious behavior should be reported via the project mailing list, or via the web-based bug reporting system. Both of these are available here:
https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/vile