Vim Documentation: os_beos


   	For Vim version 5.0p.  Last modification: 1997 Oct 19


		  VIM REFERENCE MANUAL    by Bram Moolenaar


This file contains the particularities for the BeBox/BeOS version of Vim.

This is based on a simple port of Vim 5.0 to the BeOS Preview Release
(also known as PR or DR9) for non-Intel CPUs ONLY.

The default syntax highlighting mostly works with different foreground
colours to hightlight items. This works best if you set your terminal
window to a darkish background and light letters. If you use the default
light background and dark letters, it may look better to simply reverse
the notion of foreground and background colour settings. To do this, add
this to your .vimrc file (where <Esc> may need to be replaced with the
escape character):

>  if &term == "beos-ansi"
>      set t_AB=<Esc>[3%dm
>      set t_AF=<Esc>[4%dm
>  endif

From the Advanced Access Preview Release (AAPR) on, Vim can be
configured with the standard configure script. To get the compiler and
its flags right, use the following command from the shell:

CC=$COMPILER CFLAGS="$DEFAULT_C_FLAGS -O7" ./configure --prefix=/boot/local

$COMPILER is usually "mwcc", $DEFAULT_C_FLAGS is usually "-I- -I."

Obviously, you need the unlimited linker to actually link Vim. See
http://www.metrowerks.com for purchasing the CodeWarrior compiler for
BeOS. There are currently no other linkers that can do the job.

This probably won't be able to include the Perl or Python interfaces
even if you have the appropriate files installed.


Because some POSIX/UNIX features are still missing[1], there is no
direct OS support for read-with-timeout. This would meat that you cannot
use :mappings of more than one character, unless you also :set
notimeout.

To circumvent this problem, I added a workaround to provide the
necessary input with timeout by using an extra thread which reads ahead
one character. As a side effect, it also makes Vim recognise when the
Terminal window resizes. The current implementation has one
disadvantage: when starting a subshell or other external command that
reads input from the terminal, the first character may still be read by
Vim, and acted upon when the subshell ends. To revert to the old
situation, edit os_beos.h.

Function keys are not supported since they produce very indistinctive
character sequences.

There is no GUI yet.

BeOS uses Unicode and UTF-8 for text strings (16-bit characters encoded
to 8-bit characters). Vim assumes ISO-Latin-1 or other 8-bit character
codes.  This does not produce the desired results for non-ASCII
characters. Try the command :digraphs to see. Use :set isprint=@ to
(slightly) improve the display of ISO-Latin-1 characters 128-255.

You may also use the /boot/bin/xtou command to convert UTF-8 files from
(xtou -f iso1 filename) or to (xtou -t iso1 filename) ISO-Latin-1
characters.

[1]: there is no select() on file descriptors; the termios VMIN and
VTIME settings do not seem to work properly.

-Olaf Seibert
rhialto@polder.ubc.kun.nl
http://polder.ubc.kun.nl/~rhialto/be

Generated by vim2html on Mon Nov 3 03:34:24 EST 1997