The Tilde Text Editor

About Tilde

Tilde is a text editor for the console/terminal, which provides an intuitive interface for people accustomed to GUI environments such as Gnome, KDE and Windows. For example, the short-cut to copy the current selection is Control-C, and to paste the previously copied text the short-cut Control-V can be used. As another example, the File menu can be accessed by pressing Meta-F.

However, being a terminal-based program there are limitations. Not all terminals provide sufficient information to the client programs to make Tilde behave in the most intuitive way. When this is the case, Tilde provides work-arounds which should be easy to work with.

The main audience for Tilde is users who normally work in GUI environments, but sometimes require an editor for a console/terminal environment. This may be because the computer in question is a server which does not provide a GUI, or is accessed remotely over SSH. Tilde allows these users to edit files without having to learn a completely new interface, such as vi or Emacs do. A result of this choice is that Tilde will not provide all the fancy features that Vim or Emacs provide, but only the most used features.

News

Tilde version 0.2.0 released

This release adds configuration of the attributes and colors used for drawing from the interface, and follows the API changes of libt3widget. (Requires libt3widget >= 0.2.0)

12-Oct-2012

Tilde version 0.1.15 released

Explicitly use the t3_widget namespace for key_t to allow building on some platforms.

12-Sep-2012

Tilde version 0.1.14 released

This release adds brace matching and highlighting, and preserves ACLs and extended attributes if libacl and libattr are present. (Requires libt3widget >= 0.1.14)

12-Sep-2012

Tilde version 0.1.13 released

This release adds an option to select the encoding of the files named on the command line, and fixes the handling of files encoded as UTF-8 with BOM.

31-Jul-2012

Download

Tilde is available as source, and binary packages for several Linux distributions (thanks to the Open Build Service provided by OpenSUSE).

Source

The source for Tilde is available here. Older releases are available here. To compile Tilde, you will need a C++ compiler, the latest libraries of the Tilde Terminal Toolkit (libt3config, libt3highlight, libt3key, libt3widget and libt3window), libtranscript, libsigc++ and libunistring.

Debian and Ubuntu packages (i386/amd64)

Binary packages are provided for Debian 5.0 (Lenny), 6.0 (Squeeze) and Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), 11.04 (Natty Narwhal), 11.10 (Oneric Ocelot), and 12.04 (Precise Pangolin). To quickly install Tilde on Ubuntu use:

wget http://os.ghalkes.nl/sources.list.d/install_repo.sh ; sudo sh ./install_repo.sh ; sudo apt-get install tilde

For those people who want more control over the installation process: the packages are provided in a repository which also contains the libraries that Tilde depends on, and a keyring package (tilde-keyring) which automatically installs the GnuPG key for the repository. For each distribution a .list file is provided here.

Once the repository is installed, you can install Tilde by running apt-get install tilde as root, or by selecting the tilde package from your regular package manager.

OpenSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise (i586/x86_64)

Download the .repo file for your version of OpenSUSE (11.4, 12.1, 12.2, Tumbleweed) or SUSE Linux Enterprise (10, 11, 11-SP1, 11-SP2) and put it in /etc/zypp/repos.d. You can now install Tilde using the normal tools. For example, you can run zypper install tilde (as root).

Fedora and Centos/RedHat Enterprise Linux (i586/x86_64)

Download the .repo file for your version of Fedora (15, 16, 17) or Centos/RedHat Enterprise Linux (5, 6) and put it in /etc/yum.repos.d. You can now install Tilde using the normal tools. For example, you can run yum install tilde (as root).

Mandriva (i586/x86_64)

Unfortunately the Mandriva package manager does not seem to understand the repository format provided by OpenSUSE's Open Build Service (if someone knows how to make it work, I'd be happy to provide better instructions). That means to use the Mandriva packages you have to download the packages manually. There are packages for Mandriva 2009.1, 2010 and 2010.1. 2011.

Contact

You can reach me at: tilde @ REMOVE ghalkes.nl.