Kephra - Thoughts

This place is dedicated to some essays that I've written to clean up my mind and to get clear about what I want to achieve with that project. They can be considered as my opinions and hopefully the common ground I will have here with people who contribute major parts. The paragraphs below are telling you what the texts are about in particular .
If you are interested in more practical informations read the roadmap or if this all doesn't make sense to you, start with the introduction.

Looking For The Editor I Wish To Use

Main goal of this project is to create a perfect or at least a practical text editor for coding, scripting, web authoring and writing poems and mail. Like Larry I would want that it will become anything to anybody and I would be happy if the most picky users are satisfied with that programm. Yes I'm glad to be a dreamer, knowing that it will be a long road. Therefore I plan in short term to create something usefull for me and my people (perl monks and nuns, webdeveloper).

Most of the foundation and development of this project did not happen rationally but by instinct and and forced by fortune. So it would be bigheaded and unreal to announce a clear vision god gave me on a mountain but nevertheless some things are very important to me and my crew. And while we're writing on this software we try to be aware of some basic virtues, hoping the user will appreciate that. These virtues are curiosity, abundance and devotion.

With curiosity I mean an open mental state which is aware of the joy to explore and make something new or at least different. There are so many exciting ideas unseen and unthought of (not from gods perspective, but from our). Why should we wait? Why not create something cool today! That is the purpose of life! Sure, we will grab all the good things from vi, emacs, codewright and jedit but I'm not keen about to play only catchup. This is our fresh new playground, so we will take advantage of that and everybody is wholeheartedly invited to join us to contribute something he likes. Even if he mostly uses another editor. I hope this place will alway be open for new ideas, concepts and people.

Life is meant to be happy and abundand.

Devotion! Good software is devoted to the user.

Releasing in Numbers

I want a version counting that makes sense (I want a pony!). Read how I got it. >>

Our Config File Format

For storing any kind of settings we choose the apache styled "conf" file format, which is a mix of "xml" and "ini". In other words it has context enabling nested namespaces like in xml but is human readable as good as a plain ini file. There are still other formats in use like xrc or plain perl, but they are depreciated and will be removed. Maybe we add some day "yaml" as our second config format.

Both conf and yaml are complex enough to handle with the native perl datatypes so that we can store settings in the same order as they work in the program without any time consuming translation. The second benefit of it is that users who prefer to edit config files, can can see all settings in their logical order and easily understand what they are reading. That ist also a great benefit for translators who are attempt to translate the program into an foreign language. All phrases the program handles, are stored in one conf file. So they know the context of the short phrases, which makes the translation much easier.