arsenic-atg / jate

A text editor created in C which supports all features expected from a minimal text editor with no dependencies

J.A.T.E.

Just Another Terminal-based Editor (JATE) is an attempt to make a fully functional bare bones text editor in C ( without any dependencies by directly manipulating terminal via V100 escape sequences )

Insipred from kilo text editor

Status : Beta Version

The editor can now :

• View already existing file on the system.
• Edit a text file
• Check if the file is in modified state or not ( and warn if you try to exit a modified file without saving )
• Save chagnes to the open file ( using Ctrl-s )
• Quit (using Ctrl-q )

---

But still it can't :

• Create a new file
• Save a blank file ( Save-as feature )
• support text highlithing for C/C++

⚠️ WARNING: The software is still in Beta version so if you planning to use it, I suggest making regular backups of your work in case you run into bugs in the editor.

Platform supported

Linux, macOS, windows(with cygwin)

Prerequisites

• Cmake
• C compiler

Get it running

• git clone or download.

• Navigate to the repository.

• Run cmake . command and let CMake generate a Makefile according to your system configuration.

• Run a make command on your terminal to compile source.

• Run exectuatable with the name JATE.

$ cd text-editor
$ cmake .
$ make
$ ./JATE <optional: file name that you want to open>

Thank You for visiting

jate's Issues

cursor going out of screen bounds

Summary

cursor is not bound to the size to windows

Description

once the screen boundary is hit, the cursor is not visibly going out of the window but each attempt to go outside is being registered as a valid attempt and thus need double the amount of movement in reverse direction to move the cursor by one unit.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Move the cursor to the end of the screen.
2. Attempt to move it out of the screen via another keypress.
3. now try to move it to one unit in opposite direction.

Test Results

the user would want additional amount of keypresses in order to move the cursor by one unit as the keypresses attempting to navigate the cursor out of the bounds is getting registered

Add functionality to `DEL_KEY`

Current status :

The DEL_KEY is already mapped to "delete" key on keyboard and the editor can read it properly, but unable to process it currently.

Desired result :

Upon pressing the delete key on keyboard, the editor should remove a character directly to it's right ( unlike BACKSPACE which delete's character directly to it's left )

Area of interest in source :

• editor_process_keypress () : BACKSPACE_KEY is already implemented ( I guess implementing DEL_KEY would be very similar to it )

get file to open via command line argument

currently editor opens a test file specific on my pc

make it open any file user wants by taking file name from command line argument

Render special characters properly when in edit mode

currently the special characters( like backspace, newline etc ) are handled as an "ordinary character" and are directly printed on console.

Warn about unsaved changes

Currently the editor partially supports saving to disk feature, but the editor doesn't give any warning whatsoever if the user tries to quit the application without saving and potentially loosing all their work.

How to open text editor on ubuntu 20.04 ?

How to open this text editor on ubuntu 20.04 ?

Add "Save to disk" feature

Currently the editor is more like a scratch pad, which only saves the changes temporarily and they are lost after quitting.

A basic editor needs to have ability to save the edited file to the disk.

Editor is continuously reading same character

instead of waiting for user input, editor is continuously taking old input and displaying it.

root of the problem might be editor_process_keypress() or editor_read_key().

Create a message bar to display the info about the editor

create a message bar to show user some messages including hints to use the editor and taking user input to search the file ( search feature will be implemented in future )

Welcome message

Add a welcome message on the startup to greet the user at startup

Build instructions

Build instructions do not work, Please rename "CmakeLists.txt" to "CMakeLists.txt"

repainting each line on refresh

instead of clearing the entire screen before each refresh, it seems more optimal to clear each line on screen refresh.

implement line navigation

when the user presses > at the end of a line then take it to start of next line and visa-versa

implement vertical and horizontal scrolling in the text editor

navigation breaks when character is deleted at the starting of line

Steps to reproduce

1. delete a character when the cursor is at the beginning of the line
2. try to navigate to the other side ( along positive x-axis )

Ideally the cursor should move to the desired location in just one keypress, but now it takes more that one ( number of times we backspaced to be precise )

caused after :

commit ad92840

Status Bar

Add a status bar in the editor which will tell info about name, how many lines are in the file, and what line you’re currently on etc

Typo mistake

In readme the repository spelling is incorrect
Please correct it
Thanks

warnings while doing make [related to c99]

cc src/editor.c -o editor -Wall -Wextra -pedantic -std=c99
src/editor.c: In function ‘editor_open’:
src/editor.c:377:16: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘strdup’; did you mean ‘strcmp’? [-Wimplicit-function-declaration]
  377 |   E.filename = strdup(file_name);
      |                ^~~~~~
      |                strcmp
src/editor.c:377:14: warning: assignment to ‘char *’ from ‘int’ makes pointer from integer without a cast [-Wint-conversion]
  377 |   E.filename = strdup(file_name);
      |              ^
src/editor.c:385:13: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘getline’ [-Wimplicit-function-declaration]
  385 |   linelen = getline(&line, &linecap, fp);
      |             ^~~~~~~
src/editor.c: In function ‘editor_save’:
src/editor.c:438:11: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘ftruncate’; did you mean ‘strncat’? [-Wimplicit-function-declaration]
  438 |       if (ftruncate(file_descriptor, length) != -1)
      |           ^~~~~~~~~
      |           strncat

these warnings pop while using make of version 4.2.1 x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
as most of these warnings are related to c99 and posix. some quick #define would do the job

Make the editor understand tabs

make the editor understand and render tabs properly

Buggy

Combinations of inserting and moving cursor cause crashes.

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
>                                                   ^[[D__GI___libc_realloc (oldmem=0x4b5b1b3e0a0d4b5b, bytes=1264261952) at malloc.c:3154
3154    malloc.c: No such file or directory.
(gdb) bt
#0  __GI___libc_realloc (oldmem=0x4b5b1b3e0a0d4b5b, bytes=1264261952) at malloc.c:3154
#1  0x0000555555556b36 in editor_row_insert_char ()
#2  0x0000555555556e1f in editor_insert_char ()
#3  0x0000555555557e43 in editor_process_keypress ()
#4  0x0000555555557f55 in main ()
(gdb) 
>

I tried to integrate this code into another project, also got some of these. This may be my doing as I made a number of terminal changes but I suspect it is an error in the core code.

free or corruption (!prev)

I am going to give up on using this project for now, promising start but very buggy and unclear about its own memory management.

I built it with gcc (Ubuntu 9.4.0-1ubuntu1~20.04) 9.4.0) Linux Mint with the following options:

-O0 -Wall -g -fstack-protector-all

This seem to highlight some more bugs.

ctrl+Z and ctrl+C sending signal to terminate the process

Make the editor render ordinary characters

Currently the editor is more like a text viewer and user can't do much apart from opening and navigating files.

Aim: Add enough functionality to the editor so that now user can type ordinary characters on the editor from their keyboards.

Editor confusing empty line with end of file

When navigating in the file, if an empty line is encountered, the cursor treats it as the end of file and navigates back to top of the page.

maybe this has to do with implementation of clipping cursor to the end of line in editor_navigate_cursor() function

Text Viewing functionality

make text editor open and view text files in it.

Editor crashing when user tries to delete character at the beginning of the line.

The editor is most probably triggering an undefined behaviour when user tries to perform text deletion ( via backspace ) at the beginning of the line and there is text in the previous line

Probable faulty area/s :-

• editor_delete_row ()
• editor_delete_char ()

Occurred after commit : -

commit : e373967

Split the program across multiple files

• Split the program across multiple files so that it becomes easier to work and debug.
• update makefile to link the files together during building.

splitting is partially marked with comments in the main file.

compilation error when compiled manually using gcc

compilation error

src/editor.c:720:9: error: a label can only be part of a statement and a declaration is not a statement
  720 |         bool save_sucess = editor_save();

edit: this error was produced in gcc
fixed in:- #35

Implement a "Save as" feature

move Cursor

give user the ability to move the cursor across the screen