Announcing the first beta release of Wily.

What is Wily?

Wily's basic functions are to edit and search for text and to run
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.

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 the last
few months.

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?

http://www.cs.usyd.edu.au/~gary/wily/wily.tgz or
ftp://ftp.cs.usyd.edu.au/gary/wily.tgz  (tar'ed, gzip'ed file)

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?

See the README, but basically do whatever you like so long as you don't
make money out of it and you leave my name around.
