Version 0.8.6 of Diakonos is now available. Install by gem install diakonos. I’ve been on a bit of a tear lately with development, and as a result, we have several nice new features in Diakonos.

Users can now define their own custom status variables to display whatever they want on the Diakonos status line. As an example, I’ve placed a git branch script in a new scripts directory of the source code repository. It demonstrates how to use hooks and status variables to show the git branch the current file belongs to, if the file is in a git repository.

Diakonos now accepts a -m (–open-matching) argument which will open all files in the current directory subtree which match the given regular expression — a sort of “grep and open“.

A few formatting features were added. First, the long-awaited comment and uncomment functions. As you’ve come to expect with Diakonos, comment characters are language specific and completely customizable. I also added a function to hard wrap text at a margin. As well, the snazzy new columnize function was added. Watch how to use it in this mini screencast:

Finally, I am very pleased to present in this latest Diakonos version the brand new built-in help system. Up till now, the “help” provided by the F1 key has been … well it’s been borderline useless. (For those of you that don’t know, all it did was list all the mappings of keys to functions, in a not so user friendly way.) But with 0.8.6, you are brought into an interactive, searchable help system which has a growing number of documents that cover many aspects of Diakonos from usage to configuration to default keys to tips and tricks. I’d tell you more — but I want you to try it! I’ve designed it to further my goal of Diakonos being the most user friendly console text editor available for Linux. If Diakonos falls short of this, I want to know.

The rest of the changes are described in this version’s full changelog:

• Find-as-you-type added.
• Help system added.
• print_mapped_function added.
• User-definable status line variables added.
• :after_open and :after_buffer_switch hooks added.
• Sample script for git branch status variable added.
• comment_out and uncomment functions added.
• comment_string and comment_close_string settings added.
• Added -m (–open-matching) command line argument.
• wrap_paragraph function and wrap_margin setting added for hard wrapping text.
• columnize function and column_delimiter setting added.
• Numerous small fixes, adjustments and refactorings.

Report any bugs here, or come visit me in IRC!

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