Kephra - Documentation

This is the index page of the Kephra online help. This whole chapter is written more or less user-centric. For deeper informations please orientate on the menu on the right side. If you are interested in the way i think and planned this editor, please read our thoughts.

Navigation Guide

Explains the location and purpose of all major GUI parts. >>

Advanced Feature Tour

About most nonstandard functions which can improve speed and joy of work. >>

Search Regex

The search engine of Scintilla has some Optionion for Regular Expression. They are listed in this overview. >>

Config Files

This section handles the question what config file is for what purpose. And how you can edit them. Mostly all settings can be written in one big file or many many small but because readability and practical reasons each main task has its own config file. Currently we use apache styled conf and YAML as config formats. Some thougths about our config file format may help you.

FAQ

What means Kephra ? It is the scarab god (neter) of ancient Egypt. I understand is as the principle of self creation - use Kephra to write Kephra. The rising sun (morning - the hour of Kephra) is also a nice analogy of the rising Programs - once written with Kephra - now run on their own. In (my favorite) esoteric tradition Kephra stands also for an enlightened, unified consciousness, that comes from the center (heart), exactly the way we want to create the perfect editor.
Why another text editor ? Because no one - and we testet over 70 - has what we need and isn't even build upon a base that could ever provide it. Please read the introduction. to find out what makes Kephra goal set so special.
Why you have such a low version number ?. Because our initial goal - marked as version 1.0 - is set very high. The number indicate roughly our current position regarding to that goal, but every stable version is made ready for end user. More information about this jou find in the versioning thougths.
Any released Mac or Linux Versions ? Kephra runs under Linux and but explicit packages should follow.
How to install Kephra from CPAN shell ? If you have installed Perl on your computer a simple cpan command in the shell should open CPAN shell. Maybe you'r required to reserve the needed rights with "sudo cpan". In the the CPAN shell it takes only an "install Kephra" (currently force install- we fix that ASAP).Sometimes you have to also copy the config and help into ~/.kephra/ too (hope to fix that too). To install development versions from CPAN you list available versions with "ls LICHTKIND". Then "install LICHTKIND/Kephra-version.tar.gz". "q" followed by <Enter> closes the CPAN shell.
Is it Unicode safe? Yes, UTF-8 ist currently the only encoding.

Glossary

Explaining the terms we use frequently.


caret	or textcursor, is a blinking marker for your current position in text, moveable with the keyboard
cursor	is a symbol on the screen that is moved by mouse. It enables a way to control the program.
EOL	End Of Line mode. The line breaking format will ordinary be defined by your operating system. Unix has lf or line feed, Macintosh cr or carry return and Windows cr and lf.
hard tabs	real tabs, a single character that takes the space of several whitespaces
LLI	Long Line Indicator, or right margin is a vertical line on the edit panel. It helps to keep an favoured maximum line width.
soft tabs	a bunch of whitespaces that look like a tab and will inserted if you press the tab key
tab	tabulator character was ment to enable tables in the early times of computing. It is generated by the tab key(on the left side of the keyboard, upon shift) and it is only only character who has width of several characters.