Introduction
Uv is a lightweight text editor that supports UTF-8 unicode, and provides a small set of advanced text and file manipulation abilities.
Uv provides a way to manipulate ASCII and UTF-8 file formats. In addition, Uv has the ability to read in streaming data from the command line, which can then be saved in a UTF-8 file. Uv also provides tools for block highlighting and multiple selections, as well as regular expression based search and replace functions.
Program Design
We decided to start writing Uv after realizing that we were using multiple different text editors, each for different purposes, because no one text editor provided all the features we required. The original goal for Uv was to write a text editor that could read streaming data from the command line, allow for block highlighting and multiple selections, all while supporting UTF-8. During the creation, we also decided to incorporate regular expression searches as another level of convenience.
Tested Platforms
We have successfully compiled Uv using GCC g++ version 3.3.3. We have successfully compiled Uv on SuSE Linux 7.3, SuSE Linux 9.1 and Mandrake 10.0.
Usage
Running Uv
Uv may be started many different ways, depending on what you want to open with it.
If you want to start a blank session:
>uv
If you want to open a file:
>uv file.txt
If you want to pipe text from another program, such as less, into qv:
>less file.txt | uv -
If you want qv to display streaming text from a program, such as ping:
>ping eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu | uv -
Block Highlighting
Uv supports highlighting vertical columns of code. This is known as block highlighting. A block of code is highlighted by holding down the Ctrl button and the left mouse button, while dragging the mouse from one corner of the block to another. Blocks can be cut, copied, and pasted just like a normal selection. If you wish to insert a block as the block, instead of in one line, you press Ctrl+Shift+V.
Multiple Selections
You can turn on and off Multiple Selection mode by checking the Multiple Selection Mode box, located in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. While in Multiple Selection mode, every time you highlight a new section of text, it doesnt remove your previous selections. When you perform an operation, such as delete, all selected text is affected. When multiple selections are cut or copied, the order in which they are pasted is the same as the order in which they were selected.
Streaming Text
Streaming text refers to text which is being generated while Uv is open, which Uv continously reads in and adds to the current file. This is most commonly used to keep logs, as well as for files being read over the internet. Whether or not Uv is reading text from the stream can be turned on and off using the Start/Stop Reading Input button in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.
>ping eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu | uv -
Download
The latest source code and documentation for Uv can always be downloaded from http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/uv/downloads/