An editor for plain text.

Proportional font support, word-wrap, scrolling, clipboard integration, unlimited undo.

Reliable; tested with Moby Dick.

Easy to understand. 1200 lines of code excluding comments.

Getting started

Install LÖVE. It's just a 5MB download, open-source and extremely well-behaved.

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/text2.love *.lua

By default, text2.love reads/writes the file lines.txt in a directory relative to this app.

To open a different file, drop it on the text2.love 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.

• If you ever see a crash when clicking on the mouse, it might be because a mouse press and release need to happen in separate frames. Try pressing and releasing more slowly and let me know if that helps or not. This is klunky, sorry.

• Can't scroll while selecting text with mouse.

• No scrollbars yet. That stuff is hard.

API

The editor is entirely within edit.lua, which should be easy to include in other LÖVE projects. It depends on one external (but included) library: json.lua.

Initialization and preflight check:

• edit.load() -- one-time initialization
• edit.is_this_love_version_supported()
• edit.preferred_love_version()

Create empty editor within given borders:

• editor = edit.new_from_defaults(top, left, right, bottom)

Load and (auto)save files:

• edit.load_file(editor, filename)
• edit.maybe_autosave(editor, dt)
• edit.final_save(editor)

Remember editor settings across restart:

• settings = edit.load_settings()
• edit.new_from_settings(settings, top, left, right, bottom) -- side-effect: resizes the window
• edit.save_settings(editor)

Places to wire into your LÖVE app:

• edit.draw(editor)

• edit.on_key_pressed(editor, key, scancode, isrepeat)

• edit.on_text_input(editor, t)

• edit.on_key_released(editor, key, scancode)

• edit.on_mouse_pressed(editor, x,y, mouse_button)

• edit.on_mouse_released(editor, x,y, mouse_button)

• edit.on_mouse_wheel_moved(editor, dx,dy)

• edit.resize(editor, width, height, right, bottom)

• edit.on_focus(editor, in_focus)

Optional helpers:

• edit.update_font_settings(editor, font_height) -- automatically called by keyboard shortcuts by default
• edit.absolutize(filename) -- included for convenience

Mirrors and Forks

This repo is a fork of lines.love, aiming to be more elegant and have fewer bugs. Updates to it can be downloaded from:

• https://git.merveilles.town/akkartik/text2.love
• https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/text2.love

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

• https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/view2.love -- a stripped down version without support for modifying files; useful starting point for some forks.
• https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/fractions.love -- an example showing how to enforce arbitrary policies about placing and decorating characters by overriding the workhorse internal I.get_rect method.

Feedback

Most appreciated. Messages, PRs, patches, forks, it's all good.