Introduction
============

Tilde is a text editor for the console/terminal, which aims to be as intuitive
as possible for users who are 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.

Tilde is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3. See
the file COPYING for details.


Features
========

The current version of Tilde provides the following features:
- Intuitive interface for users accustomed to GUI environments
- All actions available through menu items
- Multiple files can be open at the same time
- The window can be split to show multiple files simultaneously
- Line wrapping at word boundaries
- Detection of terminal capabilities for optimal display of complex Unicode
  texts
- Regular expression search & replace
- Indenting using either tabs or spaces
- Indent/unindent selection
- Basic automatic indentation (repeats indentation of previous line)
- Mouse support
- X11 clipboard and primary selection integration
- Optional saving of backup file
- Syntax highlighting
- Brace matching and highlighting

See the file named TODO for information on which features are planned for
future versions of Tilde.


Prerequisites and installation
==============================

Tilde requires a C++ compiler, the libraries of the Tilde Terminal Toolkit
(libt3window, libt3key, libt3widget and libt3config), libunistring and
libtranscript. Optionally Tilde can use libattr and libacl to preserve
attributes and ACLs when saving.

There are two ways in which to compile Tilde:

Using the configure script:
---

$ ./configure
or
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr
(see ./configure --help for more tuning options)
$ make all
$ make install
(assumes working install program)

Manually editing the Makefile to suit your computer:
---

$ cp Makefile.in Makefile

Edit the values for the different variables, using the comments in the
Makefile for guidance, to suit your environment.

$ make all
$ make install
(assumes working install program)

The Makefile in the distribution should work on all POSIX compatible make's.
It has been tested using both GNU make and BSD make.


Reporting bugs
==============

If you think you have found a bug, please check that you are using the latest
version of Tilde [http://os.ghalkes.nl/tilde]. When reporting bugs, please
include a minimal example that demonstrates the problem.


Author
======

Gertjan Halkes <tilde@ghalkes.nl>
