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 0.1.9 released

This release updates to libt3highlight 0.2.0. This version is a preview release.

23-Jan-2012

Tilde version 0.1.8 released

This release updates to libt3widget 0.1.7. This version is a preview release.

31-Dec-2011

Tilde version 0.1.7 released

This release removes an inadvertently included reference to prce_version, which broke building on certain platforms. This version is a preview release.

22-Dec-2011

Tilde version 0.1.6 released

This release adds optional saving of backup files, and deprecates libt3unicode in favour of libunistring. Furthermore it fixes a bug which would cause Tilde to crash if a file named on the command line could not be loaded, and a bug in the syntax highlighting of the first line of single line files.

The simultaneous release of libt3widget (0.1.6) adds mouse support to Tilde on terminals which support it, and integration with the X11 clipboard and primary selection. This version is a preview release.

22-Dec-2011

Tilde version 0.1.5 released

This release fixes a crash on loading of syntax highlighting patterns from the menu. This version is a preview release.

06-Nov-2011

Tilde version 0.1.4 released

This release adds "strip trailing spaces on save" as an option, and a "strip trailing spaces" tool. Furthermore, simple autocompletion from the existing text is now available. This version is a preview release.

The latest libt3widget release (0.1.5), which is required to build this version of Tilde, adds "Replace in selection" support and fixes the "Replace all" option. Furthermore the default color scheme has been changed to make sure the text is readable in all circumstances, regardless of syntax highlighting.

05-Nov-2011

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 9.10 (Karmic Koala), 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat), 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) and 11.10 (Oneric Ocelot). 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. To easily download the .list file and install the repository, a script is provided. The script must be run as root, for example by sudo sh install_repo.sh.

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. Updates will be published in the repository as well, so you will automatically receive updates to Tilde with your other updates.

OpenSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise (i586/x86_64)

Download the .repo file for your version of OpenSUSE (11.3, 11.4, 12.1, Factory, Tumbleweed) or SUSE Linux Enterprise (10, 11, 11-SP1) 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) 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.