NAME

Kephra - crossplatform, GUI-Texteditor along perllike Paradigms

SYNOPSIS

> kephra [<files>]   # start with certain files open

DESCRIPTION

This module install's a complete editor application with all its configs and documentation for your programming, web and text authoring.

Philosophy

Main Goals

4 main desires I want to fulfill with Kephra:

  • low entrance / easy to use

  • highly configurable/adaptable to personal preferences

  • rich feature set / new developements

  • beauty / good integration on GUI, code and config level

Name

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 that has wings. Thats also a nice metaphor for an editor through which we give birth to programs, before they rise on their own.

Details

I believe that Kephra's agenda is very similar to Perl's.

  • make a low entry barrier

  • copy what people like and are used to

  • give choices (TMTOWDI)

    • usable with mouse and keyboard commands and menus

    • deliver vi (commandline) and emacs (complex keybinding) input style

    • configure via dialog and yaml/conf files ...

    • much more ...

  • but keep an eye on the overall, that all fits together nicely

Furthermore I made some design decisions that should define Kephra:

  • beautiful, well crafted GUI with own Icons

  • most features are optional / configurable

  • easy extendable with our beloved perl

  • solve things with minimal effort (no bloat / minimal dependencies)

  • turn CPAN into a IDE and provide just the glue

I believe strongly that there is much more possible with GUI editors and text editors in general than we are used today. So I try to design Kephra in a way, that every programmer can alter and extend it easily. That can speed up progress or at least makes Kephra more comfortable for you.

That is the plan, but we are currently not nearly that far.

Features

Beside all the basic stuff that you would expect from a notepad, we have file sessions, simple templates, recent closed files, and file functions applied to all files, where it makes sense.

We have also a pile of advanced text navigation (on braces or blockwise), goto last edit or 10 doc spanning Bookmarks as well as find in files.

Advanced undo, line editing (edit functions that take the current line as input), move selected text by mouse or keyboard. Formating funtions like blockformat, align blocks, indenting, commenting ...

Documents have several properties like syntax styling, auto indention, tab width, tab use, write protection.

View options contain switches for any GUI element and marker for: current line, end of line bytes, right margin, indetion guides, bracehiglighting, line wrap and font.

Every menu and toolbar is evaluated from a simple yaml file, so you can change it easily by opening this files from the config menu.

ROADMAP

Stable Release 0.4

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. And its about time that it will released so that can we can concentrate more on features for coding support.

Stable Release 0.5

Things like output panel, code folding, snippet lib, help integration, autocompletition and so on. Hope that by the end of 0.4.n series will be the extention API stable.

SUPPORT

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

AUTHORS

  • Herbert Breunung <lichtkind@cpan.org> (main author)

  • Jens Neuwerk <jenne@gmxpro.net> (author of icons, GUI advisor)

  • Adam Kennedy <adamk@cpan.org> (cpanification)

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

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.

2 POD Errors

The following errors were encountered while parsing the POD:

Around line 264:

'=item' outside of any '=over'

Around line 270:

You forgot a '=back' before '=head1'