skim text file reader

by Drew Perttula and David McClosky

some highlighting on the #python irc channel
using skim to locate a particular discussion in one of my own IM chat logs
skim helps me scan a source file for the part I'm interested in (a real-life skim usage!)
another real-life use of skim to browse a source file

skim is an alternative text file viewer with a graphical interface and advanced searching and browsing features. It requires Python 2.2 or later with Tkinter, and it can make use of Wordnet with pywn.

The important features of skim are:

the birdseye view, where you can see a representation of your whole file (or a zoomed piece) at the same time that you browse the text
the advanced search features where you can, for example, highlight several words at once (like Google's cache) and even highlight related words (synonyms, misspellings)
the combination of the above two features; which means that you can see all the matches in your whole document at once. Now you can browse right to the clusters of matches. Compare this to your other programs, where you have to hit 'next' a bunch of times and wade through all the out-of-context matches. In skim, you can see instantly where the search matches occur together, which is probably the part you wanted to read.

Download

ez_install users can simply run easy_install skim.

You can download an archive as a gzipped tar file or zip file.

Skim uses the Python distutils. Run "python setup.py install" to install it.

CVS access

Anonymous CVS is available. Run this command:

cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous@bigasterisk.com:/srcmirror co skim

That will make a new directory "skim" off the current directory and checkout the latest version of skim into it. In that directory, you can run "cvs update -d" anytime to freshen your skim version.

ViewCVS is available

Skim roundup issue tracker