Live apps that can have text editor widgets

A template repo for building live apps that juggle text editor widgets. The editors support copy/paste, search, infinite undo, etc. You can't quite modify editor functionality live (yet?).

This repo is a fork of lines.love, an editor for plain text where you can also seamlessly insert line drawings. Designed above all to be easy to modify and give you early warning if your modifications break something.

Invocation

To run from the terminal, pass this directory to LÖVE, optionally with a file path to edit.

Alternatively, turn it into a .love file you can double-click on:

$ zip -r /tmp/text.love *.lua

By default, it reads/writes the file lines.txt in your default user/home directory (https://love2d.org/wiki/love.filesystem.getUserDirectory).

To open a different file, drop it on the app window.

Keyboard shortcuts

While editing text:

• ctrl+f to find patterns within a file
• ctrl+c to copy, ctrl+x to cut, ctrl+v to paste
• ctrl+z to undo, ctrl+y to redo
• ctrl+= to zoom in, ctrl+- to zoom out, ctrl+0 to reset zoom
• alt+right/alt+left to jump to the next/previous word, respectively
• mouse drag or shift + movement to select text, ctrl+a to select all

Exclusively tested so far with a US keyboard layout. If you use a different layout, please let me know if things worked, or if you found anything amiss: http://akkartik.name/contact

Known issues

• No support yet for Unicode graphemes spanning multiple codepoints.

• No support yet for right-to-left languages.

• Undo/redo may be sluggish in large files. Large files may grow sluggish in other ways. Works well in all circumstances with files under 50KB.

• If you kill the process, say by force-quitting because things things get sluggish, you can lose data.

• Long wrapping lines can't yet distinguish between the cursor at end of one screen line and start of the next, so clicking the mouse to position the cursor can very occasionally do the wrong thing.

• Can't scroll while selecting text with mouse.

• No scrollbars yet. That stuff is hard.

Mirrors and Forks

This repo is a fork of lines.love at http://akkartik.name/lines.html. Its immediate upstream is text.love, a version without support for line drawings. Updates to it can be downloaded from:

• https://codeberg.org/akkartik/template-live-editor.love

Further forks are encouraged. If you show me your fork, I'll link to it here.

Feedback

Most appreciated.