Since vym is under the GPL, the sources should be part of your distribution e.g. in SUSE LINUX they can be installed easily with YaST from the CD/DVD.

You also can get them via the vym homepage:

http://www.InSilmaril.de/vym

or you find the latest version at the project site.:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/vym/

See the questions about CVS -> How to do an anonymous checkout

You need

• The sources of vym. (See the question about getting the sources)
• a installation of Trolltechs QT. A part of QT are the development tools, from those tools especially the translation tool "Linguist" is needed.
  
  Note: In some Linux distributions the development tools are in an extra package, e.g. on SUSE LINUX you should have installed:
  qt3-devel.rpm
  qt3-devel-doc.rpm
  qt3-devel-tools.rpm
  qt3-man.rpm
  If you don't have QT in your system, you can get it from
  www.trolltech.com

Once you are able to compile vym yourself, you can translate the text in vym itself by performing the following steps:

• Let's assume now your encoding is "NEW" instead of for example "de" for german or "en" for english
• Copy the file lang/vym_en.ts to lang/vym_NEW.ts
  (The code itself contains the english version.)
• Add lang/vym_NEW.ts to the TRANSLATIONS section of vym.pro
• Run Linguist on vym_NEW.ts and do the translation
• Run lrelease to create vym_NEW.qm
• Run the local copy of vym to check your changes: vym -l
  (Alternatively you can do a make install to install vym completely in your system.)
  

If you feel brave, you can also translate the manual. It is written in LaTeX, you just have to change the file tex/vym.tex. (Linguist and QT are not needed, but it is useful to know how to work with LaTeX and esp. pdflatex to create the PDF.)

Please mail me every translation you have done. I can also give you a developer access to the project, if you want to provide translations regulary.

Thanks for helping to make vym more popular!

The best way to get a new feature into vym is to code it yourself ;-)

If you can't code it or don't want to, you can ask on the mailing list (see project site at https://sourceforge.net/projects/vym/) or contact me directly.

Unfortunatly I am quite busy with my "real life" work and my family, so I don't have as much time to improve vym as I would like to have. The most important features are already there, I think, I will concentrate on adding an infrastructure for scripting and connectivity to other software, I guess.

vym runs perfectly under KDE, but doesn't make use of KDE libraries so far. There are some things which could be improved by using KDE:

• Better file dialogs (network transparency e.g. with FTP and webDAV support)
• Better printer support through kprinter
• unique look and feel on KDE desktop

But: at the moment I do not intend to port vym to KDE. It would make cross platform builds more difficult, as people would also need KDE development environment.

A compromise could be to use a small wrapper library which provides access to the most important KDE features (see above), if KDE is present on the system. Unfortunatly I don't have time at the moment to implement this, so if you want to help, please contact me.

So far there is no windows version of vym. Since vym is quite portable, it shouldn't be too difficult. Basically there are three ways to port vym to windows:

• Use the cygwin project to run a Linux application on windows: http://www.cygwin.com/
  (I can't really help here, since I don't have it)
• Use the commercial version of QT 3.x for windows
  (I can't really help here, since I don't have it)
• Wait for the QT 4 port of vym. QT 4 also has a free windows edition

If you are interesting in porting vym to windows, feel free to contact me.

Update: Thomas Kriener started to port vym to window, have a look at

http://www.kriener.de/index.pl/vym4win

(Please not that I can't give support for vym on windows.)

Update (2006-08-23):

A user reported that vym4win tried to pack all files in "My documents" into its .vym file. Currently I do not recommend to use vym4win, until this is fixed. This can't be done by myself, I don't have windows machines.

Though this is not possible (yet), there is a nice workaround meanwhile:

Mainbranches (these are the ones closes to the mapcenter) can be positioned freely, so just use one of those. You can then "hide" their link to the mapcenter in the context menu.

The "Back to Main Page" branch in this map is an example.