Ion
===

Copyright (c) Tuomo Valkonen 1999-2009.

tuomov at iki.fi

<https://iki.fi/tuomov/ion/>
          

Building and installing
-----------------------

1. Make sure you have the following tools and libraries installed (along
   with, of course, standard X11 and libc stuff).

    * GNU make <https://www.gnu.org/software/make/>
    * Lua 5.1 <https://www.lua.org/>
    * gettext <https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/>

2. Edit `system.mk` to suit your system. 

3. If you want to build some extra modules now or do not want to build
   some of the standard modules, edit `modulelist.mk`.
   
4. Run `make`. Note that `make` here refers to GNU make which is usually
   named `gmake` on systems with some other implementation of make as 
   default.
   
5. Run `make install`, as root if you set `$PREFIX` in `system.mk` to a 
   directory that requires those privileges.
   
   YOU SHOULD NOT SKIP THIS STEP unless you know what you are doing. Ion
   will refuse to start if it can not find all the necessary uncorrupt
   configuration files either in `$PREFIX/etc/ion3/` or in `~/.ion3/`.

6. How to best set up `startx` or whatever to start Ion instead of your
   current window manager depends on your system's setup. A good guess
   is creating or modifying an executable shell script `.xsession` in your
   home directory to start Ion. This should usually (but not always) work
   if you're using some X display/login manager. If `~/.xsession` does not 
   help and you're not using a display manager, modifying `~/.xinitrc` or 
   creating one based on your system's `xinitrc` (wherever that may be; 
   use `locate`) may be what you need to do. Note that unlike `.xsession`, 
   a `.xinitrc` should usually do much more setup than simply start a few
   programs of your choice.

Please see the file `RELNOTES` for additional release-specific installation
and configuration notes.


Some optional installation steps
--------------------------------

1. The F5 and F6 keys expect to find the program `run-mailcap` to select
   a program to view a file based on its guessed MIME type. Unless you are
   using Debian, most likely you don't have it, but any other similar 
   program (or just plain old text editor) will do as well -- just modify the
   bindings in `cfg_ioncore.lua`. Of course, if you don't want to use the 
   feature at this time or never, you may simply skip this step. If you want
   to use `run-mailcap`, it can be found from the following address, as a 
   source tarball as well:
   
       <https://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/net/mime-support.html>

2. Ion supports caching known man-pages in a file for faster man-page
   completion in the F1 man page query. To enable this feature, you must
   periodically run a cronjob to build this list. To create a system-wide
   man page cache, run `crontab -e` (might vary depending on platform) as
   root and enter a line such as follows:

        15 05 * * * $SHAREDIR/ion-completeman -mksyscache

   Replace `$SHAREDIR` with the setting from `system.mk`. This example 
   runs daily at 05:15, but you may modify the  run times to your needs;
   see the crontab manual. 
   
   If you can't or do not want to build a system-wide man page cache, run
   `crontab -e` as your normal user and replace `-mksyscache` with
   `-mkusercache` above. The cache file will be `~/.ion3/mancache`.
   
   It may also be useful to run `ion-completeman` with the suitable
   `-mk*cache` argument once manually to build the initial cache.
   
   If the `MANPATH` environment variable is not set on your system and it
   does not have the `manpath` command (or it does not print anything 
   sensible), you may also want to set the `ION_MANPATH` environment
   variable to the list of paths where the system stores manual pages.


Configuration
-------------

For help on modifying Ion's configuration files, PLEASE READ THE DOCUMENT
"Configuring and extending Ion3 with Lua" available from the Ion web page,
listed at the top of this file.


Questions, comments, problems?
------------------------------

If the available documentation does not answer your question, please
post it to the mailing list. Details can be found on the Ion web page
listed at the top of this file.


Credits
-------

Ion was written by Tuomo Valkonen.

The dock module was written by Tom Payne and Per Olofsson.

`utils/ion-completefile/ion-completefile.c` is based on editline, (c)
1992 Simmule Turner and Rich Salz. See the file for details.

The code that `de/fontset.c` is based on seems to have been originally
written by Tomohiro Kubota, but see the file for details.

Various (minor) patches have been contributed by other individuals 
unlisted  here. See the mailing list archives and the darcs source 
repository history at <https://iki.fi/tuomov/repos/>. For translators
see the individual `.po` files in `po/`.

See `libtu/README` for code by others integrated into libtu.