Levee, or

Description

Levee is my attempt to write a vi clone. It was originally written for USCD Pascal I.5 on the Terak 8510a, ported to USCD Pascal 4.0 on the Sage and Pinnacle 68000-based microcomputers, ported back to I.5, but rewritten in P2 (a Pascal derivative language I wrote in 1983 or thereabouts), rewritten in Pascal for an MP/M box, then my friend John Tainter and I re-re-rewrote it in C so we could run it on our newly-purchased Atari 520STs in 1985, and then I re-re-re-rewrote it for FlexOS when I was working at CPT in (yuck!) Eden Prairie, MN.

When Atari began to roll belly-up, we both abandoned that platform for PCs and re-re-re-re-etc-wrote it for MS-DOS, and when I started using Linux in 1992 I rewrote it AGAIN, and after a few years where I didn’t use it because of the existance of nvi (and Caldera releasing vi as open source) I started using it and maintaining it again.

Source Code

• 4.0 is, after approximately 30 years, a new major release, with a few bug fixes, a few feature enhancements, and a pretty major reworking to make the code more portable.

  bug fixes:

  1. fix a 39 year old bug where changing the last line in a file wouldn’t refresh properly.
  2. fix a newer bug where if a file wasn’t newline terminated a random garbage byte would be added to it when written out
  3. (not a bug, but annoying) I’d accepted a patch that mapped ‘g’ to ‘1G’, which has the annoying side-effect of making the previously-unused key right next to `h' into a fumblefinger that was regularly making me leap away from what I was working on, so I backed this right on out.

  feature enhancements:

  1. Properly implement the ‘#’ & ‘%’ expansions in ex-mode file lists.
  2. Implement “ as an ex-mode command (comment, mainly for ctags variants that use ” to separate out extended positioning data.)
  3. Implement the :tag (ex-mode) & ^] (visual mode) commands, plus an tagstack that can be backed down.

  In addition, I went on a pretty extensive code shuffling spree to move all of the OS-dependent code out of the main source and into a collection of OS-dependency modules, and then turned around and reported Levee to Windows 10 (via the Win32 interface) and OS/2.

• 3.5b adds compatability with the creeping bloatware that is C on OSX 10.10 – apparently getline() and getcontext() have suddenly become part of the thrice-damned standard library, so my getline() and getcontext(), which have been compiling without complaint for over 20 years now, suddenly conflict with the clown car of chaos that is the standard of the week.

  This wasn’t something I discovered; Peter Aronoff tried to compile levee on a 10.10 machine and had the C compile throw a tantrum on him (the copy of levee I use was compiled on a 10.5 machine and has been working without complaint since then), so he patched the bug, added a new feature (g maps to 1G for symmetry with G taking you to the end of the file), and did some editing on the documentation. And then I went in and updated my email address (I am never going to move back to Chicago, so staying in the chi.il.us pseudo-top-level domain is kind of silly) and it’s now version 3.5b.

  Enjoy the minimal changes and wait for OSX 10.11 to make more of my functional space magically reserved.

• 3.5a had to be released because I was bitten by the double curse of Xcode becoming more gnu out from under me and modern commercial Linuxes becoming, if possible, even more gnu than they were before.

  On top of these configuration changes, I’ve also added another new feature in the form of “0” as a movement command like you’ll find in the other, higher priced, versions of vi.

• 3.5 has, after a gap of about 15 years, a new feature in the form of the “!” command in visual mode. Other than that, there are no changes from 3.4p.

• 3.4p has been reworked so that it can be configured with configure.sh, and has the additional minor feature that it better supports consoles and gui windows that come in different sizes. This is the first new-feature-release in quite some time (I believe the last feature went into levee sometime prior to 1998).

  This release is thanks to Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, from the Debian Linux project, who sent me mail on 15-Jun-2007 asking if I’d be willing to accept some patches and roll levee up to a new release so that Debian wouldn’t be carrying around a decade’s worth of differences from the baseline. I’ve not gotten his patches yet (version 3.4q will no doubt follow 3.4p in quick succession,) but after he sent me the mail I got the whim to build levee on a freeBSD box. That didn’t work (and it didn’t work in a fairly spectacular fashion,) so I spent 5 hours replacing the old “here are a dozen or so settings you have to set by hand” arrangement with one that doesn’t involve getting a Masters degree in Levee coding. It’s uncertain whether configure.sh will get along with dos, the atari.st, rmx, or flexos (signs say “no”), but you should be able to run configure.sh on a Unix machine, then export the configured code to your dos/atari/rmx/flexos box and build it there.

• 3.4o has no features that haven’t been in levee since the late 1980s, but it compiles cleanly with cc -Wall (for values of cc which translate to gcc 2.7.2 – I don’t officially support any newer versions of that thrice-damned compiler – or, maybe, pcc,) which is important, I guess.

And, just in case you’re wondering, no, I never watched the Captain Video TV show when I was young – I don’t even think I was even aware of the name except as a silly name until just recently – I just liked the funny juxtiposition of names.