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jtt · 10-11-2013, 11:12 AM

Hi,

as I already mentioned in another thread I considered writing a program that allows to use the vi or vim editor on PocketBooks with a touch screen. This project now has reached a stage where I hope it might also be of interest to other people.

The package consists of two parts. On the one hand there's a slightly modified version of the most recent release (7.4) of vim (the vi program already installed on the PocketBook unfortuntely is too crippled to be of any use). One the other hand there's the vip.app apllication that interfaces with the editor and takes care of displaying what you edit. For principle reasons this set-up can only work on devices where pseudoterminals can be used!

When the program is running the editor is shown in the upper part of the screen while a keyboard occupies the lower part. The editor mostly is controlled via this keyboard, but a few functionalities work via the touch screen: taps in the left, upper, right or lower part of the editor portion of the screen work exactly as the arrow keys and up- and downward swipes scroll up and down. Pinching movements in- or decrease the font size used for the editor. A long tap (or a press of the menu button) brings up a on-screen movement for selection of the keyboard layout and rotation. Short presses of the forward and backward buttons cycle through the keyboard layouts and long presses increase or decrease the fomt size.

There are two packages you can download. The compressed tar archive contains all the sources as well as the pre-compiled binaries. The zip archive consists of the binaries only. A short installation instruction can be found in the README-vip file. Note that the packages are rather large (13 and 8.5 MB) - this is due to the complete vim runtime environment - you rather likely will pare that down to what you really want installed.

Here are the links:

http://users.physik.fu-berlin.de/~jtt/PB/vip.tar.gz
http://users.physik.fu-berlin.de/~jtt/PB/vip.zip
http://users.physik.fu-berlin.de/~jtt/PB/README-vip.txt

The program was tested on a PB622 with firmware 4.2 and a PB623 with firmware 4.3. I can't say if they also work properly with other devices.

Best regards, Jens

10-11-2013, 11:12 AM	#1
jtt Connoisseur Posts: 97 Karma: 90350 Join Date: Aug 2013 Location: Berlin, Germany Device: PB 622, PB 623	vim for PocketBook 622 and 623 Hi, as I already mentioned in another thread I considered writing a program that allows to use the vi or vim editor on PocketBooks with a touch screen. This project now has reached a stage where I hope it might also be of interest to other people. The package consists of two parts. On the one hand there's a slightly modified version of the most recent release (7.4) of vim (the vi program already installed on the PocketBook unfortuntely is too crippled to be of any use). One the other hand there's the vip.app apllication that interfaces with the editor and takes care of displaying what you edit. For principle reasons this set-up can only work on devices where pseudoterminals can be used! When the program is running the editor is shown in the upper part of the screen while a keyboard occupies the lower part. The editor mostly is controlled via this keyboard, but a few functionalities work via the touch screen: taps in the left, upper, right or lower part of the editor portion of the screen work exactly as the arrow keys and up- and downward swipes scroll up and down. Pinching movements in- or decrease the font size used for the editor. A long tap (or a press of the menu button) brings up a on-screen movement for selection of the keyboard layout and rotation. Short presses of the forward and backward buttons cycle through the keyboard layouts and long presses increase or decrease the fomt size. There are two packages you can download. The compressed tar archive contains all the sources as well as the pre-compiled binaries. The zip archive consists of the binaries only. A short installation instruction can be found in the README-vip file. Note that the packages are rather large (13 and 8.5 MB) - this is due to the complete vim runtime environment - you rather likely will pare that down to what you really want installed. Here are the links: http://users.physik.fu-berlin.de/~jtt/PB/vip.tar.gz http://users.physik.fu-berlin.de/~jtt/PB/vip.zip http://users.physik.fu-berlin.de/~jtt/PB/README-vip.txt The program was tested on a PB622 with firmware 4.2 and a PB623 with firmware 4.3. I can't say if they also work properly with other devices. Best regards, Jens