[2] An older version (vile 8.0) was presented in Chapter 12 of the O'Reilly book "Learning the vi Editor".

This is in contrast to the other common vi-clones (elvis, nvi and vim), which have combined their respective extensions with the original vi documentation.

The predefined information from the tables can be rendered in various ways, including showing the available commands, providing name-completion, etc.

Some of this is brought out in the O'Reilly book, though no careful study has been made of the way in which features are adopted and adapted across the vi and emacs variants.

vile can be customized by defining majormodes, which combine specific settings of the buffer modes with an association to the file type.

Most of the syntax filters are implemented with lex (preferably flex), with the remainder in C to address irregular grammars such as Perl and Ruby.

All of the syntax filters follow the same design: vile paints the markup information on top of the buffer contents using in regions delimited by line and column numbers.