Editorial
A text editor for your terminal, written in C++20.
Please note: This is probably not a replacement for your editor of choice. It has a pretty small feature set, but I hope that you find it interesting, at least from a programming standpoint.
Features
- Fast syntax highlighting for C++, Markdown, and MIPS assembly (activated by file extension)
- Basic undo/redo functionality
- Small implementation; around 900 lines of C++ code (not including generated code)
- Extremely low CPU and memory usage
- Scrolling using arrow keys
- Works on any terminal supported by ncurses (essentially anything Unix-like)
Key Bindings
Ctrl-s : Save the file to disk
Ctrl-c : Quit (without saving)
Ctrl-z : Undo last action (e.g. moving left one character, deleting a character)
Left and Right Arrows : Move cursor one character forward/backward
Up and Down Arrows : Move cursor one line up/down
Tab : Insert four spaces at the cursor
Installation
When you first clone the repository, run ./build-full.sh. This
script will do the code-generation necessary to do fast syntax
highlighting. This script will call both build-code-gen.sh and
./build.sh.
After the initial cloning/full build, just run ./build.sh to rebuild after any changes
to the main source code of the program (i.e. everything besides the
syntax highlighting). If you do modify any of the code generation code,
run ./build-full.sh to get a build reflecting those changes.
The build scripts are set up to use clang++ as the compiler, but you can
easily change this within each script. The scripts are all very short, so this
should be straightforward. Also, be sure that you have ncurses installed
and in a location that your compiler can find.
Most Unix-like systems should already have an ncurses shared library, but on Windows you will most likely have to install PDCurses, which implements the same interface as ncurses on Windows platforms. This editor only uses the most basic features of ncurses (no fancy widgets or anything), so it should be compatible with PDCurses. However, this has not been tested.
If there is no viable ncurses support for your platform, it should be
straightforward to port over the necessary terminal drawing code.
See screen.h and screen.cpp for the implementation of the ncurses wrapper.