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About the XMLtype project
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Setting Up XMLtype
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About the XMLtype project

Overview
Main Features
Known Bugs and Limitations
Developer's Notes

Overview

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.

Main Features

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

Known Bugs and Limitations

  • 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.

Developer's Notes

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.