STEP-WRITER

🤓 Shared Text Editor Program - Writer.
A Lightweight & Simple C++ TUI Text Editor.

Overview.

Step-Writer is a TUI text editor. Which simulates vim motions and other customizable features. I am doing this because the remote servers at UBC does not have neovim installed... So why not make my own text editor.

Implemented Features:

• Selectable title screen logos!
• h, j, k, l movements in normal mode.
• Enter insert mode by pressing i.
• Press enter on the file in the explorer in order to open the file.
• Press q to return to main menu. (Probably should change that...)
• You can add your own features by going into the TextFileViewer.cpp file.
• Syntax Highlighting using Tree Sitter. (Will improve)
• Saving file. ctrl + p saves and quits.
• File Explorer navigation with collapsible tabs.
• Status Bar indicating the mode (INSERT, NORMAL, VISUAL)

Figure 1. Overview of the project using Wezterm

I'll try to update this blog which should contain a better documentation and progress of the state of the application. (Though, I have a bad schedule of updating said site.)

Below, you can see this editor editing it's own source code as per the tradition!

Figure 2. Editing it's own source code.

Installation.

1. Clone the project using git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/BrianAnakPintar/step-writer.git
2. Once cloned go to the step-writer folder, create a build directory by typing mkdir build and go to that directory by running cd build
3. Next, run cmake ..
4. Make the program by running make
5. Finally, run the program ./step-writer from the build directory.

If you have already cloned the project without using the --recurse-submodules flag, then

1. Clone the project (Assuming it's not already cloned)
2. Once you have cloned, go into the step-writer folder using cd step-writer
3. Run git submodule update --init --recursive
4. Go back to the step-writer directory and create a build directory by typing mkdir build and go to that directory by running cd build
5. Next, run cmake ..
6. Make the program by running make
7. Finally, run the program ./step-writer from the build directory.

Todo (soo many things to do ;-;)

• Better file view hierarchy enabling users to see project structures and directory contents.
• Fix simple line deletion bugs.
• A working terminal.
• Better cursor movement.
• Syntax Highlighting (Sort of).
  • Basic syntax highlighting.
  • Implement colors for ALL types.
  • Update syntax tree when user inputs a line.
  • Use TSCursor for movement
  • Use TSInputEdit changing existing tree rather than reparsing everything from scratch.
• Use a rope gap buffer data structure.
• Search functionality
• ctrl + c and ctrl + v functionality. The OP copy + paste
• REFACTOR, REFACTOR, REFACTOR! So many cleanup to do 😭
• Custom keybindings
• Settings menu
• ctrl + z UNDO functionality.

Acknowledgements

The project uses FTXUI for the terminal UI components, it is a very cool TUI library that anyone planning to make a TUI application in C++ should consider using. Aside from that it also uses Tree-Sitter which is an incremental parsing system that I use for syntax highlighting.

OLD DEMOS

Video of trying to implement syntax higlighting, encountering indexing bugs.