Kephra - crossplatform, GUI-Texteditor along Perl alike Paradigms
> kephra [<files>] # start with certain files open
This module install's a complete editor application with all its configs and documentation for your programming, web and text authoring.
A visually harmonic and beautiful, sparing and elegantly programed Editor, that helpes you with all you tasks. It should be also able to operate in the way you prefer and be not afraid to try new things.
My ideal is a balance of:
low entrance / easy to use
rich feature set (CPAN IDE)
highly configurable / adaptable to personal preferences
beauty / good integration on GUI, code and config level
That sounds maybe generic but we go for the grail of editing, nothing lesser.
Especially from the last item derives the name, which is old egyptian and means something like heart. Because true beauty and a harmonic synchronisation of all parts of the consciousness begins when your heart awakens. Some call that true love. In egypt tradition this was symbolized with a rising sun (ra) and the principle of this was pictured as a scarab beatle with wings. Thats also a nice metaphor for an editor through which we give birth to programs, before they rise on their own.
I believe that Kephra's agenda is very similar to Perl's. Its common wisdom that freedom means not only happiness but also life works most effective in freedom. So there should not only be more than one way to write a programm, but also more than one way use an editor. You could:
select menu items
make kombinations of keystrokes
point and click your way with the mouse
type short edit commands
So the question should not be vi or emacs, but how to combine the different strengths (command input field and optional emacs-like keymap possibilities). Perl was also a combination of popular tools and concepts into a single powerful language.
Though I don't want to just adopt what has proven to be mighty. There are a lot of tools (especially in the graphical realm) that are still waiting to be discovered or aren't widely known. In Perl we write and rewrite them faster and much more dense than in C or Java. Some function that help me every day a lot, I written were in very few lines.
But many good tools are already on CPAN and Kephra should just be the glue and graphical layer to give you the possibilities of these module to your fingertips in that form you prefer. This helpes also to improve these modules, when they have more users that can give the authors feedback. It motivates the community, when we can use our own tools and the perl ecosystem does not depend on outer software like eclipse, even if it's sometimes useful.
Perl's second slogan is "Keep easy things easy and make hard things possible". To me it reads "Don't scare away the beginners and grow as you go". And like Perl I want to handle the complex things with as least effort as possible. From the beginning Kephra was a useful programm and will continue so.
Beside all the basic stuff that you would expect I listed here some features by category in main menu:
file sessions, history, simple templates, open all of a dir, insert, autosave by timer, save copy as, rename, close all other, detection if file where changed elsewhere
unlimited undo with fast modes, replace (clipboard and selection), line edit functions, move line/selection, indenting, block formating, delete trailing space, comment, convert (case, space or indention) rectangular selection with mouse and keyboard, auto- and braceindention
bracenav, blocknav, doc spanning bookmarks, goto last edit, last doc, rich search, incremental search, searchbar and search dialog
run script (integrated output panel), notepad panel, color picker
syntax mode, codepage, tab use, tab width, EOL, write protection
all app parts and margins can be switched on and off, syntaxhighlighting bracelight, ight margin, indention guide, caret line, line wrap, EOL marker, visible whitespace, changeable font
config files to be opened through a menu: settings, all menus, commandID's, event binding, icon binding, key binding, localisation (translate just one file to transelate the app), syntaxmodes
and some help texts to be opened as normal files
A more comlete roadmap you can find here.
main new features are:
GUI abstraction layer, searchbar, output panel, brace navigation, notepad, file history menu, templates, some more context menus
This release is about getting the editor liquid or highly configurable. Its also about improvements in the user interface and of course the little things we missed, but config dialog was delayed.
- folding, - test suite - new hotpluggable localisation system that also does some UTF semi-automatically - initial czech and norwegian translation
- new tabbar and doc ref handling - partial test suite fix
- codings and right UTF handling - code marker - better, richer UI - more tools
- fix and extend test suite
- fix config install under linux and mac - config dialog - plugin API - file browser or tree lib extension
- config dialog - stability for 0.5
Coding support like Perl::Tidy, outlining, help integration, autocompletition and so on will be the goals for the next round. Not all of them but some. Because 0.5 is mainly about a stable plugin API also some of the first Plugins should appear. Main theme for 0.6 is language specific tools and syntax rich modes replacing just bare bone syntax styles.
Bugs should be reported via the CPAN bug tracker at
http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=Kephra
For other issues, contact the author.
More info and resources you find on our sourceforge web page under:
http://kephra.sourceforge.net
Herbert Breunung <lichtkind@cpan.org> (main author)
Jens Neuwerk (author of icons, GUI advisor)
Andreas Kaschner (linux and mac ports)
Adam Kennedy <adamk@cpan.org> (cpanification)
Gabor Szabo <szabgab@cpan.org>
Renee Bäcker <module@renee-baecker.de> (color picker)
This Copyright applies only to the "Kephra" Perl software distribution, not the icons bundled within.
Copyright 2004 - 2008 Herbert Breunung.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU GPL.
The full text of the license can be found in the LICENSE file included with this module.
10 POD Errors
The following errors were encountered while parsing the POD:
You forgot a '=back' before '=head2'
'=item' outside of any '=over'
You forgot a '=back' before '=head1'
Non-ASCII character seen before =encoding in 'Bäcker'. Assuming CP1252
To install Kephra, copy and paste the appropriate command in to your terminal.
cpanm
cpanm Kephra
CPAN shell
perl -MCPAN -e shell install Kephra
For more information on module installation, please visit the detailed CPAN module installation guide.