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

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.

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 with 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. 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.

Features

Beside all the basic stuff that you would expect I listed here some features by category in main menu:

File

file sessions, recents, simple templates, open all of a dir, insert, autosave by timer, save copy as, rename, close all other, detection if file where changed elsewhere

Editing

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

Navigation

bracenav, blocknav, doc spanning bookmarks, goto last edit, last doc, rich search, incremental search, searchbar and search dialog

Tools

run script (integrated output panel), notepad panel

Doc Property

syntax mode, tab use, tab width, EOL, write protection

View

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

Configs

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

ROADMAP

Stable 0.4

main features:

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.

TODO

fix config install under linux and mac

fix test suite

Stable 0.4.1

folding, printing, test suite, and new hotpluggable localisation system that also does UTF semi-automatically, initian czech and norwegian translation

Stable 0.4.2

snippet lib, outlining?

Stable 0.5

Things like code folding, snippet lib, help integration, autocompletition and so on. wish 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.

cpanm Kephra

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install Kephra