Announcing the second beta release of Wily. (0.13.23)

What is Wily?

Wily edits and displays text and directories, and runs
commands.  It requires UNIX, X and a three-button mouse.
It is intended to eventually be an integrated working
environment for all tasks involving text.  It uses the mouse
heavily.  It emphasises speed for experienced users, but is
probably simple to learn as it has very few concepts.

There are simple mouse-based editors for beginners, and
fast, powerful keyboard-based editors for experts.  Wily is
a simple, fast, powerful mouse-based editor for experts. ;-)

It is based heavily on the Acme environment from Plan
9, which in turn was strongly influenced by the Oberon
environment.

What's different about it?

Wily is quite different from most other editors in a number
of areas.  Nearly all operations are through mouse actions
on text on the screen: there are no menus, and almost no
"key bindings" or "function keys".  Full support for Unicode
and proportionally-spaced text is provided.  A bitmapped
terminal and three-button mouse are assumed, and "chords"
(combinations of mouse buttons) are used extensively.
Minimising the number of keystrokes and mouse actions needed
while working with wily was a design aim.  Wily itself is
almost totally UNconfigurable, but it is quite simple to
connect wily to other programs, written in _any_ language,
both for simple text-manipulation tasks, and to use wily as
a front-end for other programs such as mail or news readers,
or terminals.  It is possible (and intended) to "live"
in wily as with other, more complicated editors.  Wily
itself is pretty simple, and small (148k for the stripped
dynamically linked binary on the author's machine, c.f. 236k
for vi, 2044k for xemacs).

What state is it in?

Development continues, but it is probably ready for most
people to use.  About fifty people have been using it
continuously for more than a year.

More information?

Can be found at http://www.cs.usyd.edu.au/~gary/wily/
http://plan9.att.com/plan9/doc/acme.html describes the Plan
9 program that wily was modelled after.

Where do you get it?
ftp://ftp.cs.su.oz.au/gary/wily/
ftp://ftp.math.tau.ac.il/pub/laden/wily
ftp://ftp.cs.york.ac.uk:/pub/mhw/wily/
ftp://ftp.northsea.com:/pub/plan9_unix/wily/

Will it work on my system?

I hope so.  There's a 'configure' script which should work.
It has worked on SunOS, Solaris, Linux, AIX, HPUX, OSF,
Ultrix, BSDI, Irix.

What conditions/license?

The Artistic License, similar to that of Perl.
