If you find a bug or want to discuss the best way to add a new feature, please open an issue. If you have a question or want to discuss the best way to do something with MNV, you can use Discussions of Project Tick.

What is MNV?

Firstly, MNV is fork of Vi IMproved. MNV is a greatly improved version of the good old UNIX editor Vi. Many new features have been added: multi-level undo, syntax highlighting, command line history, on-line help, spell checking, filename completion, block operations, script language, etc. There is also a Graphical User Interface (GUI) available. Still, Vi compatibility is maintained, those who have Vi "in the fingers" will feel at home. See runtime/doc/vi_diff.txt for differences with Vi.

This editor is very useful for editing programs and other plain text files. All commands are given with normal keyboard characters, so those who can type with ten fingers can work very fast. Additionally, function keys can be mapped to commands by the user, and the mouse can be used.

MNV also aims to provide a (mostly) POSIX-compatible vi implementation, when compiled with a minimal feature set (typically called mnv.tiny), which is used by many Linux distributions as the default vi editor.

MNV runs under MS-Windows (7, 8, 10, 11), macOS, Haiku, VMS and almost all flavours of UNIX. Porting to other systems should not be very difficult. Older versions of MNV run on MS-DOS, MS-Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/Vista, Amiga DOS, Atari MiNT, BeOS, RISC OS and OS/2. These are no longer maintained.

Distribution

You can often use your favorite package manager to install MNV. On Mac and Linux a small version of MNV is pre-installed, you still need to install MNV if you want more features.

There are separate distributions for Unix, PC, Amiga and some other systems. This README.md file comes with the runtime archive. It includes the documentation, syntax files and other files that are used at runtime. To run MNV you must get either one of the binary archives or a source archive. Which one you need depends on the system you want to run it on and whether you want or must compile it yourself. Check https://www.mnv.org/download.php for an overview of currently available distributions.

Some popular places to get the latest MNV:

• Check out the git repository from GitHub.
• Get the source code as an archive.

Compiling

If you obtained a binary distribution you don't need to compile MNV. If you obtained a source distribution, all the stuff for compiling MNV is in the src directory. See src/INSTALL for instructions.

Installation

See one of these files for system-specific instructions. Either in the READMEdir directory (in the repository) or the top directory (if you unpack an archive):

README_ami.txt      Amiga
README_unix.txt     Unix
README_dos.txt      MS-DOS and MS-Windows
README_mac.txt      Macintosh
README_haiku.txt    Haiku
README_vms.txt      VMS

There are other README_*.txt files, depending on the distribution you used.

Documentation

The MNV tutor is a one hour training course for beginners. Often it can be started as mnvtutor. See :help tutor for more information.

The best is to use :help in MNV. If you don't have an executable yet, read runtime/doc/help.txt. It contains pointers to the other documentation files. The User Manual reads like a book and is recommended to learn to use MNV. See :help user-manual.