About the XMLtype project

Overview
Main Features
Known Bugs and Limitations
Developer's Notes

The intended goal of the XMLtype project is a console based editor of XML document-oriented files in UTF-8 encoding. It is designed from the begining for the multilingual use, even for writing bi-directional texts (e.g. mixed English and Hebrew). The focus has been put on comfortable and fast typing well-formed XMLs; XMLtype is not, therefore, to compete advanced console editors like Emacs or VIM. The project is being written in C++ under GPL license.

Requirements:

• UTF-8 console support. On Linux, it's usually supplied by console-tools.
• libxml, a XML parser written by Daniel Veillard. Included in most of the Linux distributions.

Release 0.8

• basic editing features
• capable of editing larger files
• simple bidi support (Arabic, Hebrew)
• multiple keymaps; key-bound keymap changing
• XML-editing features (closing tags, fast remark inserting, commenting/uncommenting text, etc.)
• syntax highlight
• paragraph auto-indention
• DTD-based contextual word-completing (similar to filename completing in Bash) of elements, attributes, entities and enumerated values
• undo/redo

• XMLtype changes keyboard layout for all virtual consoles, as it uses 'loadkeys' for loading keymaps.
• At the recent stage, XMLtype doesn't allow user to save file under different filename. Therefore, don't edit files located on read-only filesystem: you won't be able to save the changes!
• Typing extremely long tag names exceeding screen width without any word break can make XMLtype crash.
• Undo/redo is not quite precise in case of newline inserting/deleting.
• Markup embedded in document through external entity reference is ignored by contextual word-completing mechanism. For workaround, see config doc.

I cannot promise systematic and continuous development of XMLtype. I started to develop it simply because I couldn't find a suitable application to write my multilingual documents. However, programming is not what I am focused on and that's why I plan to add only those features which I need. If someone wishes to cooperate and make XMLtype a serious project, I would be happy to provide all information and answer the questions concerning its code.